Connecting Schools With Great Fundraising Ideas.

Today I am going to write about one of those topics you wish you never had to even think about: embezzlement. Just last week, a young stockbroker in France was arrested for making off with $7 Billion from his bank employer. That got me thinking about how often employee or volunteer theft happens in the non-profit sector, especially in our schools.

Embezzlement in any environment is bad. Embezzlement in a school is tragic. There are so many victims: the person responsible can go to jail, the students lose whatever goal they were working toward, and parents lose trust in the institution.

Consider your own school or club for a moment. Ask yourself the following questions to get a feeling for how secure you think your organization is.

• How would you rate your system for recording incoming revenue?
• How secure is the location you keep cash and checks before they are deposited?
• Have you ever seen a situation in the school office, where someone might have the opportunity to be tempted to steal?
• Has there ever been a circumstance in which money was collected at an evening event, but there was no place to take the cash until the next morning? Who takes that money home and who double checks that nothing happens to it?
• Does the responsibility for logging in donations, managing the checkbook, and approving purchases rest solely in the hands of one person?
• What kind of oversight is in place to ensure funds are secure and managed properly?
• Do checks require two signatures, for instance?

This is strictly a personal observation, but it seems to me that oftentimes, the perpetrator of this crime is generally a decent person, who wound up in a tempting situation he or she could not handle. Perhaps the daily pressures of life temporarily obscured his or her normal decision making process. I am not making an excuse for a criminal act; I’m just trying to look at this situation from an objective standpoint and come up with a realistic solution.

Although this temporary lapse of judgment may not be true in 100% of the cases, I do think it’s prevalent enough where we should all adopt the attitude of looking out for one another. If we truly care about our school, then it follows that we should care about its employees. If we care about the employees, then we should make sure they have a healthy and safe environment in which to work. Of course, we will never be able to remove all of the temptations from any location, but there is probably room to improve in most of our schools, clubs, or organizations.

From a practical standpoint, there are a number of specific policies you can implement, or ask your school to implement, that will go a long way toward deterring any form of employee or volunteer theft. There is a terrific resource list at the BusinessKnowHow.com website. You can read the article by clicking here.

If any of the above questions lead you to believe that you could possibly tighten up your particular financial system, I urge you to do so right away. Remove any sort of tempting situations through established protocols, consistency, and transparency. In the long run, you will be doing everyone a huge service.

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