Best Practices—Not: Tactics That Unintentionally Promote Fraud
Mary S. Schaeffer · 2012
This chapter describes several of the bad accounts payable practices that facilitate fraud such as: (1) Allowing employees to share passwords and user IDs (2) Employees who write their passwords and user IDs on a piece of paper or Post-It and then tape it to their computer for easy reference (3) Returning checks to anyone other than the payee (4) Not issuing a purchase order (PO) at the moment the order is placed. (5) Making every employee over a certain level an authorized check signer. (6) Not doing reference checks of employees hired in accounts payable or to deal with your money. (7) Not appropriately storing check stock (8) Not using positive pay and (9) Having a petty cash box. Poor accounts payable practices unintentionally promote fraud, while strong ones prevent it and duplicate payments. One's employees know where all the weaknesses in one's processes are. So if a business person employs any of the practices discussed in this chapter, one is opening the door should one of the employees decide he or she would like to supplement his or her income at that person's expense.