The Examiner – Insights on Fighting Financial Fraud

This blog is the third in the series, Account Reconciliation as a Control.

This blog series was developed to address the issues I have seen in the account reconciliation process. As you can imagine, I have seen plenty of pitfalls. Some were smaller than others, but there were several that were complete failures. What if you discovered someone stole almost $100,000 over several years?

This blog is the second in the series, Account Reconciliation as a Control.

The account reconciliation is an effective procedure that can help an organization identify fraud and errors, but the review is the step that makes the procedure an internal control. If it isn’t reviewed, then it isn’t a control. With this blog, I hope you see the importance of performing a review, and that you find a few tips that will help you perform an effective review.

This blog is the first in the series, Account Reconciliation as a Control.

I hate to insult people’s intelligence by covering this topic, but it is amazing the number of people who perform reconciliations incorrectly. This blog post is intended to educate rookies and seasoned veterans.

Account reconciliation—I’ve been itching to blog about this topic for some time now. It has been at the top of my list because it is such an important business process. I’ll admit that account reconciliation is not the sexiest thing in the world, but I promise to write an entertaining, engaging, informative, and inspiring series that you’ll want to share with others.

Over the past two weeks, both of my daughters had summer colds. I don’t know why, but summer colds seem worse than winter colds. The symptoms seem worse, and they always last longer.

I frequently present to audiences about fraud and ways to prevent it—like implementing internal controls. I even developed an entire training about trust versus control, which covers this concept of trusting employees versus implementing controls.

People are playing Pokémon Go everywhere. Are you playing? I downloaded the Pokémon Go app last Tuesday—less than 24 hours after telling a co-worker that I would never download it. I saw more and more hype and just couldn’t stay away any longer. The app is fun to play, and it also rewards players for walking.

This past Friday an interesting thing happened to me, and I am excited to share it with you because it relates to my last two blogs. A manager in HORNE’s healthcare practice asked for a few minutes of my time to discuss an upcoming project. She was planning an internal audit involving a client’s payroll department and wanted to discuss some fraud risks that should be considered and tests that may help uncover potential fraud.

In last week’s blog, I promised to provide some ideas on how auditors and auditees can work together to find fraud. I will deliver on that promise, while suppressing the urge to compare a fraudster’s emotions to a Fourth of July fireworks show—we will save that one for another day.

The responsibility for finding fraud is a highly debated topic and one I enjoy discussing with different groups because most individuals have a lot of passion and emotions wrapped up in their perspectives and opinions. I can’t believe that I haven’t written about this topic before, and it’s funny that it took a swarm of bees to inspire me to do so.