Question

Mr. Zen is the sole owner and manager of Beal Hypermarket. You are the internal auditor of Beal Hypermarket. Mr. Sam is working as a supervisor in Beal Hypermarket. Beal Hypermarket sells consumer goods to individual customers and has branches spread across the country. There are nearly ten cashiers operating different cash machines of the hypermarket. Recently Ms. Mary was recruited asone of the cashiers in the hypermarket. Her references and declaration were not checked properly. Mary is sister of Sam. Although Mary informed this in her employee declaration form but was overlooked by the HR team. The management was not aware about the relationship between Sam and Mary. Sam and Mary started taking money from receipts and were not recording the revenue on the books. This was possible as Sam was supervisor and had the admin password for controlling cancelled sales. Regular act of Sam and Mary made a major gap between inventory counts and cash registers. Sam is the favorite employee of Zen as he received employee of the year award consequently for the past three years. Sam has the habit of giving expensive gifts to Zen in his birthdays and anniversaries. Another employee Nancy is not liked by anyone in the organization because she doesn’t talk to anyone at the workplace. She is very reserve at the workplace. Your brother is working in a bank and Zen’s wife is the branch manager of that bank. Recent meeting of internal audit department, purchase department and the management located few observations:

Which type of lack of internal control measure/(s) (preventive, detective or corrective) are applicable in this case. Use specific answer

Answer 1

This a clear case of internal fraud where two employees of the organization are involved in malpractise. This type of frauds needs to be avoided by having DETECTIVE control measures which is missing in the organisation.

Detective control are employed to find the error after they have occured by check and balance system. This might include surpise visit, surprise cash count, review and approval of accounting work etc.

So in this case it is a clear failure of preventive control. Hence due to lack of detective measures, the fraud took place.