Question

The CFO of Gabe Corp. suspects that an employee has been stealing cash from the company. The employee is responsible for receiving cash from customers and posting the payments to the customer accounts, as well as preparing the bank reconciliation and managing the cash account. To check up on the employee, the CFO prepares his own bank reconciliation and comes up with the following:

Gabe		Differences	Bank
$3,900		Beginning balance	$4,000
(50)		Service charges
		Outstanding checks	(800)
(100)		NSF Check from Customer
		Deposits in transit	250
25		Interest earned	---------
$3,775		Total	$3,450

Do you think the employee has stolen from the company? Why or why not? If the employee has stolen, how much has been stolen? How could this kind of problem be prevented in the future?

Answer 1

Yes the employee has stolen from the company. This can be understood because after all adjustments in the reconciliation statement, the amount in the bank account should have been $3,775 however the amount in the bank account after all items of reconciliation is only $3,450. Thus there is a shortage of $325 (3775 - 3450).

Thus the employee has stolen $325.

To prevent this kind of problems in the future, there must be segregation of duties among the staff. Since the employee who stole was responsible for receiving cash from customers and posting the payments to the customer accounts, as well as preparing the bank reconciliation and managing the cash account, he had the every opportunity to steal and then hide the amount he stole. This was only when the CFO prepared his own bank reconciliation statement it could be detected that the amount has been stolen. Thus the responsibilities and duties must be segregated amount employees.