How would you respond to the two discussion posts made by shelbie and Julian about the Articles they summarized regarding Employee theft ? What do you agree or disagree with about their posts? what opinions and information would you like to add in your response about their posts? Write a response for each post. Both responses should be 200 words.

Shelbie

Warren County woman stole $273,000 from her employer

Alison McGaughey was charged with aggravated theft, identity fraud, telecommunications fraud, tampering with records and unauthorized use of properties. Alison worked as an office manager and bookkeeper for Nelsons & Associates. They manage affordable housing properties. She used company credit accounts for personal use. She bought home appliances, a lawn mower and prepaid gift cards. She allegedly set up new credit card accounts for vacations and set up fake Paypal and Visa accounts in the name of a former employee. She also altered computer records and forged bank statements to hide her theft. The investigation started in May of 2019. Her supervisor went to her house because she didn't go to work and they learned that she had changed all of her passwords and fraud alert notifications. The internal controls failed in this organization because they were not paying attention to what their employees were doing. They should notice that something was wrong because of the weird charges being put on the company credit accounts. My recommendation would be to monitor the business things more often, in this case would be the company credit account, and also watch what your employees are doing.

Response:

Julian

I am going to assume since the coronavirus is currently preventing people from working at physical locations; that is the reason why I could not find a more recent article. With that being said, Arlando M. Henderson was charged with stealing money from a bank vault in Charlotte, NC. Henderson stole more than $88,000 dollars which he used to purchase luxury items such as a Mercedes-Benz. In terms of internal controls, the bank directly failed to create a sufficient method or policy which makes committing financial institution fraud less capable. I am not sure what the bank's policies are regarding preventing fraud, but I would implement a person or a couple of people who execute daily audits every other week or so just to make sure the legitimacy of the bank's numbers are correct. This recommendation falls underneath the separation of duties that was learned in our week 4 meeting. If the bank already has a policy that generates audits, then I would again recommend they make it more frequent in hopes to deter others from stealing. Another novice recommendation might also be to keep a very few select people in charge of the bank reconciliations and bank statements(depending on size) so that they can also focus specifically on maintaining accuracy of reports.

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