Audit. Compliance. Risk Management

Hands on Experience

Some examples of real life experiences

Franchisee with a large Australian owned automotive retailer was struggling with extremely tight cash flow whilst at the same time experiencing large and consistent increases in sales. A full audit of financial and operational controls was conducted by OA Group and identified significant control weaknesses in administration function at the store. On further investigation it was revealed that the administration staff member had been taking advantage of these control weaknesses by helping herself to additional wages, superannuation, sick and annual leave.

A food service franchise system engaged OA Group to develop a store based audit program. Due to their IT infrastructure, the franchisor had no detailed visibility of franchisee daily operations and as such the audit program was developed around that risk. Part of the audit involved the use of data analytics (ACL software) to electronically match sales data from the point of sale (POS) against the franchisees bank statements. From this test it was ascertained that the franchisee had understated declared gross sales to the franchisor by $100k in a six month period. On further investigation it was discovered the understated amounts were directly associated with  transactions processed via the stores EFTPOS terminal. These sales were not recorded in the POS as there was no direct interface between the EFT system and the POS.

A large Australian based franchised retailer engaged OA Group to conduct an audit of financial and operational controls at their corporate office. Significant control weaknesses were identified in segregation of duties, delegations of authority and access controls in the accounting department. Although no fraud was discovered at the time of the audit, consequent audits discovered a fraud valued at approximately $300k where the financial controller had been processing fictitious vendors into the accounts payable system and then diverting the funds into a personal bank account.