Assignment 1: Fraud and Internal Controls
The purpose of this assignment is to use the knowledge from Module 4 on Fraud and Internal Controls and apply it to your current/future role as an HR professional, while also considering additional scholarly sources.
This assignment provides you with an opportunity to demonstrate the achievement of the following course learning outcomes:
Identify human resource risk factors that may affect organizational performance.
Use written communication skills to explain information and findings.
Instructions
Overview
You just joined a new company in the retail industry as an HR manager in the head corporate office that recently went public.
Prior to going public, the company was not very organized and there was a significant amount of employee turnover across several departments in the organization. Proper controls were not implemented. Now that the company has gone public and the importance of complying with SOX, implementing proper control measures is a key task for your team.
The HR department of your new company oversees the following:
Recruitment
Talent Development
Learning and Development
Payroll
Regular HR duties
Ethics and Business conduct
Strategy and Leadership
Some key information that you find out about your new company:
Revenue for the last year is about $200 million
There are 1500 employees
There has been a significant amount of turnover in the past
Executives have allowed family members to work at the head office
Employees are always complaining about their pay statements not adding up to the pay agreed by their hiring managers
There have been several disagreements among employees as they have found confidential information on their colleagues with respect to pay information on the computer internal HR drive
A corporate executive was recently fired as it was identified that he provided false information with respect to his professional education qualifications
The internal learning database is significantly outdated and there is old curriculum which employees are still using to update their skills
REQUIRED:
Your director is aware of the fact that you have prior accounting knowledge and have a basic understanding of Internal Controls. One of your tasks in your new position is to help the HR department work with the internal auditors to implement an effective internal control system.
Your director sends you an email and says the following:
“I know you’re fairly new to the company but based on your knowledge of the company, can you please do the following
Task 1:
Help me identify the missing controls in the HR department and explain the impact of these gaps.
Propose a recommendation for each missing control from part a. an internal control). Ensure that your recommendations are specific and detailed in order to address the missing control.
Task 2:
In addition to the above task, I’m receiving some pushback from some of the HR senior managers. They are not impressed with the auditors and are complaining that this concept of “internal controls” only applies to the Accounting team. They said something about how fraud and internal controls is solely the responsibility of the Accounting department. I would like to put together a 1-page document for them to answer some of their concerns. Can you please do some research and identify 2 scholarly business sources that either agree or disagree with their concerns? I don’t know much about this and would appreciate your expertise.”
Structure
The cover page should include name, student number, due date.
Please ensure you are following APA format for citation purposes.
Format
Length and space: 3-4 pages max.
The cover page is not included in the total number of pages and your pages should be double-spaced.
Font type: Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman
Font size: 12 points
File type: Portable Document Format (PDF), Microsoft Word (DOC or DOCX)
Resources
You are encouraged to use the resources provided in Library, Research and Writing Assistance, under the Getting Started module. Noteworthy tools include the Purdue OWL: APA Formatting and Style Guide and Grammarly.
Before you begin your assignment, review the rubric at the end of this document to understand the assignment expectations. Also, use the rubric to ensure inclusion of all marking criteria before submitting your assignment.
