Control Environment

Before a voucher for the purchase of merchandise is approved for payment, supporting documents should be compared to verify the accuracy of the liability. Give an example of supporting documents for the purchase of merchandise.

Post by Michael Vitale

(a) Name and describe the five elements of internal control. (b) Is any one element of internal control more important than another?

 

The five elements on internal control are

1.       Control Environment

2.       Risk Assessment

3.       Control Procedures

4.       Monitoring

5.       Information and Communication

Control Environment is the overall attitude from the company and management as to the importance of controls and can include management philosophy, organizational structure, and personnel policies.

Risk assessment is identifying potential risks, knowing the threat that they could cause, knowing how likely they are to occur, and minimizing in advance the damage they could cause.

Control procedures help ensure that goals will be met by taking precautions in operations like having competent personnel, separating responsibilities, and security measures.

Monitoring helps to locate weaknesses and improve control.

Information and communications helps ensure that the previous four controls are documented appropriately and communicated out.

All elements of internal control work based off the others ones, thus making them all equally important and necessary to the process.

Post by Trisha Jennison

Why should the employee who handles cash receipts not have the responsibility for maintaining the accounts receivable records? Explain.

 

The  employee that employee who handles the receipts should not be the ones that are recording the transactions in the accounting records.  These should be separated in order to reduce the chance of fraud being committed.  If they are not it  would make it easy for an employee to hide the fraud he/she committed within the accounting  records.  By separating them the fraud committed by the cash receipts  clerk would most likely be caught by the accounts receivable clerk.