I am a big believer in Disaster Recovery (DR), or having the processes with the electronics fail.
DR can also be used to perpetuate fraud, as I learned in a recent company.
We were a property management company, receiving rents monthly. We tended to go out on the 10th day of the month to collect unpaid rents.
Imagine our surprise when two tenants had handwritten receipts for paid rent…yet the automated system did not show anything?
It turned out our new receptionist was pocketing cash deposits, and handing out handwritten receipts. We discovered this quickly, and she spent time in the big house.
The lesson is to make sure your manual processes and automated ones “tie out.” At this company, nobody was checking the manual receipt log…especially where we’d had no outages.
We were fortunate…at the end of the day we lost a few hundred dollars. A bigger company with more cash could have had a devastating issue.