5 Types of Cash Larceny, and How to Prevent Them

Here are the 5 main types of cash larceny -

Stealing money from the till

Writing IOUs against personal cheques

Reversing cash transactions

Removing auditing tape

Altering cash counts

Here they are again, with more detail and the means to detect/prevent them -

STEALING MONEY FROM THE TILL

Till, or register, theft has to be the most common form of cash larceny simply because it involves direct access to cash receipts.

When cash is stolen from the register, there is already a record of the transaction on the audit roll.

Till theft leads to an imbalance between the cash in the drawer and the transaction totals on the audit roll.

In order to detect till theft it is necessary to reconcile both cash balances, and track individual cashiers, to ensure there are no employees who consistently have less cash in their drawer than the audit roll dictates that they should have.

Fraud prevention in this instance is through informing employees that reconciliation takes place, assigning passwords to each cashier, and restricting the amount of cash present in the till at any time by utilising regular cash pickups.

WRITING IOUs AGAINSTS PERSONAL CHECKS

This method of cash larceny is less effective than stealing directly from the till because it requires the fraudster to cover the balance with a personal cheque in order to allow the till balance to reconcile.

Of course, the fraudster is no better off after a while as the cheque will eventually be cashed, thereby counteracting the cash that they have already taken.

They also run the risk of having the cheque being spotted during the reconciliation process.

The best means of preventing this type of fraud is for companies to make it a matter of policy that employees cannot cash cheques, or pay for goods and services at work with them, under any circumstances.

This would make it extremely easy to detect when an employee cheque is subsequently found.

REVERSING

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