"Tumbleweed" wrote
All very much lower than "hundreds of thousands of pounds per cheque"!!
"Tumbleweed" wrote
Yes of course, but certainly *not* "hundreds of thousands of pounds" per cheque.
"Tumbleweed" wrote
It's the volume of the business being considered (cheques here), not the volume of the companies overall business, that matters.
The small volume of just a few cheques being handled by a large organisation (which is the scenario we are considering), is a similar volume to a small business!
"Tumbleweed" wrote
It's not too much more trouble for the large institution to deal with "25 cheques a week" either. Simply have "Trevor" at head office dealing with *all* the cheques, and all the thousands of staff simply pass all cheques to him to deal with (internal post!).
Whatever the "small one-man-band business" can do, Trevor can do!
"Tumbleweed" wrote
What "enforcement" laws are based on size of overall business?
"Tumbleweed" wrote
What makes you think that you can't set up business systems to deal with just a few cheques, so that these sort of audit trails can be followed - for
*much* less than "hundreds of thousands of pounds"?Again, how do you think small businesses manage?!
"Tumbleweed" wrote
No, they simply say: "ah, I see that you are one of the very few customers that choose to pay by cheque. As you'll realise, very few customers request this, and it is simply an added concession which we offer. As such, we don't deal with cheques at the call centre so I'll need to pass the query on to our dedicated cheque processing unit. They will be in touch with you within two business days." The call centre operator then sends a message (perhaps by internal e-mail) to Trevor, who deals with the query!
"Tumbleweed" wrote
No problem - they are all connected to the company network, so can send messages to Trevor...
"Tumbleweed" wrote
"needs"? Are you sure?
No - you are imposing unnecessary constraints now. The acceptance of cheques is a concession, that is given to just a few customers because they insist on using them. So the administration doesn't need to be as "immediate" as call centre staff dealing with it then&there.
"Tumbleweed" wrote
We're only talking about the same volume for the large institution ("just a few cheques").
"Tumbleweed" wrote
Even if they did, they should have no problem auditing it - as long the system has been designed & operated properly. Just like when the auditors come round to see what Trevor has been doing, there'll be no problem!
"Tumbleweed" wrote
That's their business decision. An alternative, (and this is assuming only a handful of cheques are going to be accepted, as we have been discussing) would be to do all the above but then install Trevor at head office, and tell everyone else in the organisation to pass the handful of queries that relate to cheques, on to Trevor.
No they wouldn't. See above. [Consider the small business again.]
"Tumbleweed" wrote
I doubt it. They'll only do that if it is cost-effective -- all required controls can be (and already were being) put in place without spending excessive amounts computerising every possibility.
"Tumbleweed" wrote
It was less than two drawers in a filing cabinet! Compared to all the other filing cabinets in that one department, let alone the whole organisation, the paperwork just for those few schemes was a drop in the ocean!
"Tumbleweed" wrote
That was easy to show. Each year, when the automated systems were dealing with the accounts/valuations/statements (/whatever), the team of half-a-dozen "technical experts" did the same things manually for those schemes. It was the yearly calendar that helped them to know what happened, when...
"Tumbleweed" wrote
Why do you think that? It's actually *easier* for them to see that the calculations are being performed correctly, because they can load-up the spreadsheet and see the intermediate calculations themselves. That's a lot more difficult to do, when all you are faced with is a table of results on a mainframe printout.
"Tumbleweed" wrote
It equally can't be done with an expensive, sophisticated computer system. For every fraud you can think up on a "small-scale" system, someone will be able to think up a fraud on a "large-scale" system.
"Tumbleweed" wrote
I know. I'm disputing both the 30Kpa figure, and the 2.5-3.0x multiple.
"Tumbleweed" wrote
"Tumbleweed" wrote
That's simply in with the salaries already being paid, isn't it?
"Tumbleweed" wrote
Most "person-related" taxes are taken out of the salary before the employee receives it. The only one I can think of which is "in addition to" salary is Employer's NI (12.8%). Were you thinking of any others?
"Tumbleweed" wrote
That'll be around 20-30% of salary.
"Tumbleweed" wrote
Of course, these vary greatly with different employments, but we can assume that the level of job being considered here (mainly just simple clerical work) wouldn't have a huge level of extra benefits, can't we?
"Tumbleweed" wrote
Isn't that cost included under "HR" below?
"Tumbleweed" wrote
That's where I said cost of "non-productive" staff ... (ie those not actually doing the stuff that the business gets paid for) You don't need any more HR work, if you are just using one of the other staff to do a bit of work which only takes less than 5% of their time.
Even if you need one-or-two full-time "Trevors", the extra cost in HR is not a large multiple of his salary.
Taking e-er NI & pensions, you're only talking about around 1.4x salary so far ... even 30Kpa x 1.5 is only 45Kpa, a far cry from 100Kpa.