Credit Cards Online Information

I read with significant interest "Fraud Resistant P-cards," by Donald Holde-graver (April 2005). My interest was piqued because I am an alumnus and former faculty member of Holdegraver's employer, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I am also significantly concerned about the use of purchasing cards (P-cards) particularly here at Weber State University, where I serve as accounting department chair.

Holdegraver's article suggests many processes and procedures to protect the university from fraudulent use of P-cards. The weakness found in all of his suggestions is that they all have costs in terms of actual out-of-pocket dollars or use of time.

Holdegraver places the ultimate responsibility for P-card usage on the supervisors. In an academic setting, those supervisors are department chairs. That means that the supervisor in the art department is an artist, the supervisor in the English department is a poet, and in the history department, the supervisor is a historian. Only in the accounting department will the supervisor be an accountant. I know of several excellent department chairs here at Weber State who rarely review their budgets. They probably do not even review their own credit card statements when they receive them each month. Asking them to be the ultimate accounting control would probably be as disastrous as putting me in charge of some artistic event or production. Making most department chairs ultimately responsible for controlling inappropriate P-card use is asking most of them to do something they are totally incapable of doing.

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants tells us that the purpose of internal control is to protect assets and provide reliable accounting data. I would like to suggest an additional purpose--to keep honest people honest. We should never implement any system that enables people who are basically honest to ever do anything that is dishonest. That is exactly what the system that exists at Weber State, and apparently at the University of Nebraska, does. It allows people to make honest mistakes as well as perpetrate intentionally fraudulent actions.

# posted by Medical Information : 3:17 AM