Bulletin HASKINS & SELLS 7
Watching the Little Things
THE following case is interesting because
it illustrates the pettiness of some fraud,
and also shows that an accountant will
very often discover manipulations by
merely using common sense and being constantly
vigilant.
A woman employe of an institute for
girls stole $20 by abstracting cash from the
petty cash fund. She concealed these
peculations by raising the amounts of two
laundry bills and making out the petty
cash vouchers to correspond.
In one case the defaulter raised one bill
from $5.00 to $15.00 by inserting the
figure 1 between the $ sign and the figure 5.
A public accountant discovered this manipulation
when he noticed that the figure 1
had been made with a pencil of a different
degree of hardness than that used for preparing
the rest of the statement. Upon
inquiry at the laundry company the accountant
found that the bill had been
raised $10.
In the other instance she raised the
amount from $4.64 to $14.64 by the same
method used in the first peculation. The
accountant noticed the alteration in this
case because black ink had been used for
the alteration while the original amount
had been written in blue-black ink. The
petty cash voucher attached to the bill was
written with black ink also, and was in
