Dena Brenner Case Summary

CASE SUMMARY
In this case, Dena Brenner, a young woman uses her position as Payroll Manager of the International Agricultural Seed Company, to commit fraud by paying the company's payroll. What is interesting about this case is that the fraud was performed through of the use of a phantom employee that in this case was a former employee of the company. Another interesting thing is that she did not even know that person at all, she just chose him perhaps, because the company had terminated him long time ago. According to our textbook, the employee that she used was a ghost employee, “referring to someone on the payroll who does not actually work for the victim company.” The way to commit fraud was reactivating the personal information of the former employee in the payroll system and then, change the account number from personal bank of the employee by the number of personal account
In this case, the only element that we could apply is the opportunity. Ms. Brenner, with her payroll manager position had access to the payroll system, and performs the corresponding changes to commit fraud. In addition, it was also the person in charge of the reconciliation of payroll account. I think that this fraud does not seem to be caused by financial pressures, but whether by the lack of internal control, which was a key factor to commit fraud by part of Mrs. Brenner.
Also, this case is a clear example of a lack of segregations of duties. In this case, Dena was only person that had access to the information of each employee and payroll system. Also, she had the ability to register the transactions electronically in the general ledger after each payroll period. Another key factor to commit fraud was the reconciliation of payroll account, she was the only in the reconciliation of the payroll account, and this had not been reconciled by more than two years. This facilitated way to commit