Cody Chambers agreed to help his fraternity obtain sponsors for its annual charitable event to be held during Homecoming week. He accepted this responsibility at the recommendation of last year’s fund‐raiser, who told Cody that the task would require approximately 10 hours of time and would likely result in total sponsorships of $1,000. After spending approximately 10 hours calling on previous sponsors, Cody felt that he had hit a brick wall. For many reasons, most of last year’s sponsors were unwilling to continue their involvement with this annual fund‐raiser. Cody needed to look for additional sources of funding. He spent several hours researching potential new contributors and finally located a database containing a list of businesses within the local zip code. Since the list included email addresses, Cody developed a letter of request and e‐mailed it to all these businesses.

The response was overwhelming. Cody collected over $3,000 from this new pool of business contacts. While compiling the checks received to turn over to the fraternity treasurer, Cody noticed that one business had made its $200 check payable to Cody personally.

Rationalizing that the additional time he had spent on the project and the success he was able to achieve were worthy of compensation, Cody decided to keep this one check. He wrote a letter of acknowledgment to the donor and deposited the $200 in his personal account.

Required:

a. Do you think Cody’s actions were justified? What would you have advised him to do in this situation?

b. What internal control activities could the fraternity have implemented in order to prevent Cody’s actions?

c. Can you think of a detective control that could uncover the omission of the $200 check?