A Finance Clerk who worked for Pembroke College in Cambridge was recently jailed for 30 months for stealing almost £300,000 from her Employer. Over a period of 18 months she duplicated 77 Invoices from Suppliers who were frequent and large Suppliers to the College by changing the Date, Invoice No., etc. on the duplicates through her accounting system. This in stark contrast to what is possible on accountsIQ (Details below).
When a particular Supplier’s Account was clear, she posted one of the duplicated Invoices to the Account, and having previously opened a Bank Account to which she had access, she then changed the Supplier’s Bank Details on the Computer to those of her own account.
When this Invoice was processed and paid by the system she then reversed the Bank details back to those of the Supplier in question. No one was any the wiser for quite some time as the Supplier was always paid properly and in full (before and after the interjection of the duplicate Invoice) and the College was unaware that anything untoward had happened until the Auditors uncovered the fraud – by which time all the money had disappeared on Internet gambling.
Clearly, some blame must also attach to the College for operating such a lax system which allowed a junior clerk to carry out such Supplier amendments. However, had Cambridge used accountsIQ, they would have had the capabilities to protect themselves from fraud.
AccountsIQ Enables Strict Controls For Management
Users of the accountsIQ system would almost certainly ensure that access to Supplier Maintenance facilities was confined to only the most senior and responsible staff. In addition, the Purchase Order and Purchase Invoice Approval features of the AIQ system, which ensure that all Invoices are properly approved by authorized senior personnel, will also ensure that the much more common fraud of setting up a bogus Supplier in the system is also circumvented.
And, as a further security enhancement, the next release of the accountsIQ system (Easter 2015), will now restrict access to such sensitive fields as the Supplier Bank details and also the Supplier nominated P.O. and Invoice Approver to only those Users with “Administration” privileges.
In addition to this, AccountsIQ will soon enable control of bank detail changes for a Supplier – so a clerk will be able to get into and maintain the supplier account but can only view the bank details – maintenance of bank details (and indeed approver for each supplier) is restricted to someone with admin privileges.
