Univille is a small city with a large student population due to the two universities in it. Last year Guo Garnet, a recent graduate from one of the universities, set up Uni Eats, an online food and drink ordering and delivery platform which operates within Univille. Users can read menus, reviews and ratings, order, and pay for food from participating restaurants, cafes and bars (the commercial partners) using an app or through a web browser.

As Univille is a heavily pedestrianised city, meals are delivered by couriers using bikes. The majority of the couriers employed by Uni Eats are students. Rather than following traditional hiring policies Guo employs couriers based on the recommendation of existing staff and no background checks are made prior to employing new couriers.

Couriers have ‘zero-hours’ contracts meaning they are not required to work a minimum number of hours each week and instead sign up for the hours that they wish to work. This approach has resulted in Uni Eats suffering from shortages of couriers during the university holidays (when many of their couriers returned home) and during the exam period (when many chose to focus on their studies rather than work).

In order to promote Uni Eats all couriers are provided with a uniform and insulated food storage bags to use when making deliveries. Some couriers choose to use their own bikes to make deliveries, others are issued with a new bike by Uni Eats. No record is kept of the equipment issued to any individual courier.

Users pay for their orders either online via card or they can pay cash to the courier who delivers their order. When an order is placed customers are given a guaranteed latest delivery time, Uni Eats offer a ‘your order when we say or we pay’ guarantee meaning that if the order is delivered up to 30 minutes after this time customers are given a 50% refund and if it is more than 30 minutes late a full refund. Couriers are required to log onto an app on their smartphone when an order is delivered to record the delivery time and this determines whether a refund is given. There is currently no way of verifying the accuracy of the times input into the system by couriers. Couriers are not penalised for late deliveries as Guo believes this would be “unfair – they’re doing their best and Univille is very hilly sometimes it takes time to cycle up those hills to our customers”. However, cash bonuses are given to the couriers with the highest percentage of orders delivered before the guaranteed time each week. For those orders delivered less than 30 minutes late, couriers are authorised to give the refund in cash to customers, refunds in full are credited to the card the customer used to pay for the order.

Uni Eats take a 25% commission from the commercial partners on the cost of each item that is ordered by customers. The commercial partners send monthly statements to Uni Eats setting out how much they owe the company each month and they are required to make payment within 60 days of each order. Due to a lack of finance staff Uni Eats are yet to establish their own procedures to determine how much each partner should give them instead they rely on these statements and transfer the values from the statements to Uni Eats financial records. Guo considers this to be acceptable as “I trust our partners, they’re honest people, why would they defraud us?”. He is aware that some of the commercial partners have been late in making payments, with some yet to make any payments at all, but Uni Eats currently have no procedures in place to remind commercial partners of payments owing, something Guo blames on the lack of finance staff.

Required:

In respect of Uni Eats:

a) Identify and explain five deficiencies in internal controls

b) Recommend a control to address each of the deficiencies identified in part a).

c) Describe a test of control that could be performed to identify if each of the controls identified in part b) are operating effectively.

You should present your answer using three columns headed ‘Control Deficiency’, ‘Control Recommendation’ and ‘Test of Control’ respectively