Chapter 9 Solutions manual to accompany Accounting Information Systems, Cdn ed Simkin et al.
p. 3
9-7. Competent employees are definitely important to an organization's internal control
system because employees will be working continually with the organization's various asset
resources. The employees will be, for example, handling cash, acquiring and disbursing
inventory, and operating expensive production equipment. If the organization has incompetent
employees, there is a strong likelihood that inefficient use of the firm's asset resources will
result. This inefficiency will lead to overall operating inefficiency within the organization, thereby
preventing the adherence to management's prescribed policies.
9-8. The “separation of duties” element of an organization’s internal control system
means that, for instance, employees who are given responsibility for the physical custody of
specific company assets (e.g., handling cash or inventory) should not also be given
responsibility for the record-keeping functions relating to the assets (e.g., recording cash or
inventory transactions in the company's journals and ledgers). Otherwise, an employee could
misappropriate company assets and then attempt to conceal this fraud by falsifying the
accounting records.
Through the separation of duties, one employee acts as a check on the work of another
employee. Thus, if an employee attempts to embezzle cash from a customer payment, but
does not have access to the accounts receivable subsidiary ledger to cover up this theft, he or
she would likely be detected. The other employee who performs the record-keeping activities
for accounts receivable would not have recorded the customer's payment since it was
embezzled by the employee handling cash. Consequently, the customer would complain to the
company upon receiving a subsequent billing statement which would not reflect his or her recent
payment. Upon investigating this complaint, the dishonest employee would likely be caught. It
should be noted, however, that through collusion among the employees handling assets and
recording assets, irregularities are usually not detected as quickly as when individuals work
alone (as described earlier).
In addition to detecting irregularities, separation of duties can also be helpful in detecting
accidental errors. If the same employee performs all accounting functions related to a specific
activity (e.g., handling inventory items and recording the inventory transactions), an accidental
human error by this employee, such as incorrectly recording an inventory transaction, may not
be detected. However, with two or more employees handling the accounting functions relating
to a specific activity, an accidental human error made by one employee should be detected by
another employee involved with the same activity.
9-9. Many organizations have a large volume of cash disbursement transactions. In
order to detect any errors and irregularities relating to cash disbursements, a good audit trail for
cash issuances is essential. If an organization uses both a voucher system and prenumbered
cheques for cash disbursement transactions, its audit trail of cash outlays can easily be traced.
The use of prenumbered cheques for making authorized cash disbursements enables a
company to maintain accountability over its issued cheques and its unissued cheques. After the
issued cheques clear the bank in a particular month and are returned to the organization with
the monthly bank statement, these cheques represent evidence of the actual cash
disbursements that were made. Two advantages of employing a voucher system along with
prenumbered cheques are (1) the number of cash disbursement cheques that are written is
reduced, since several invoices to the same vendor can be included on one disbursement
voucher, and (2) the disbursement voucher is an internally generated document; thus, each
voucher can be prenumbered to simplify the tracking of all payables, thereby contributing to an
effective audit trail over cash disbursements.