From time to time you will see in the headlines someone embezzling money from a church or nonprofit. Often they are caught stealing over $100,000. How do they do this? Are they a criminal mastermind with a complicated scheme?
Mostly they are just cutting checks to themselves or to pay personal bills. How would you catch this? With an independent bank reconciliation!
Do you know the most difficult fraud to detect? It’s when people steal cash from the offering plate. Sometimes we put people in a very difficult situation where they are responsible for counting the cash alone. Yikes!
Here’s some tips on how to avoid this situation.
Unfortunately sometimes people steal from the church. Most often this happens when normally good people are put in bad positions. Maybe they have a big medical bill or their spouse lost their job. Then, if the church has little to no internal controls, they may attempt to “borrow” from the church honestly hoping to pay it back later.
Your internal controls can help prevent good people from acting on bad temptations. It will also help catch people just looking to steal.
In this post, I share with you the #1 thing a church can do to prevent (not detect) fraud.
While working with the Journey Community Church in De Pere, WI, I noticed that they have an interesting way of allocating their offering to fund each budget. This was such a clever idea that could help churches struggling to get on top of their finances so I thought I’d share it.
This is starting a series on the Art of Being Cheap. Hopefully you’ll learn a little about thinking like a cheap accountant in order to save money on things that are unnecessary. We’ll start with looking at church credit cards.
If I had three pieces of advise I could give to a Finance Committee heading into the budget season, this would be that advice. You’ll end up with a better budget that the church should be more willing to live by.
The two people that worry the most about giving…probably the pastor and the treasurer. The pastor is hoping that the paycheck clears and the treasurer is hoping to be able to pay all the bills. Instead of worrying about giving, what if the Finance Committee focused on growing generous givers. There’s some simple things you can do that will make a big difference.