4 research outputs found

    Small Business Owners’ Strategies to Mitigate Employee Theft

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    Ineffective strategies and a lack of internal controls to address employee theft can negatively impact small businesses. For most small business owners impacted by employee theft, the loss of resources could be detrimental, and in some cases, force the business closure. Grounded in Cressey’s fraud triangle theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies successful small business owners use to deter employee theft behaviors. The participants comprised 8 small business owners in southeast Florida who successfully used strategic internal controls to deter employee theft and enhance employee trust in the workplace. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, company internal control policy documents, and trade recommendations of best practice and internal control frameworks for small businesses. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Six themes emerged: the reconciliation of accounts and communicating expectations for transparency, multiple eyes on accounts and separation of duties, installing system and physical access controls, conducting random reviews with internal and external audits, hiring and building the right teams, and addressing challenges and resistance to policy change and implementation. A key recommendation is to actively engage in formal and informal education of strategies and adequate internal controls to negate employee theft behaviors. The implications for positive social change include the potential for small business owners to create a positive effect within the workplace, ensuring continued employment opportunities, contributions to the community tax base, and continued social responsibility

    Internal Controls Possessed by Small Business Owners

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    On average, a small business could lose 150,000ayearduetoemployeefraudschemes.Formostofthesmallbusinessesaffectedbyemployeefraudschemes,theaverage150,000 a year due to employee fraud schemes. For most of the small businesses affected by employee fraud schemes, the average 150,000 loss could be detrimental to the small business, causing the business to close. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the internal controls small business owners apply to detect and prevent fraud from occurring in the business. The population for the study consisted of 3 small business owners located in Hartsville, South Carolina who implemented effective internal fraud controls in their business. The conceptual framework guiding the study was the fraud triangle theory. Data were collected and triangulated through semistructured interviews, company internal control policy and procedure documents, the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission internal control framework, and the Small Business Administration internal control good practices. Data were analyzed through coding. There were 3 themes which emerged in relation to addressing the central research question: cash collection, separation of duties, and attentiveness and awareness. The findings could contribute to positive social change by providing best practices for small business owners to mitigate the components of the fraud triangle and subsequently decrease, if not eliminate, fraud from occurring in small businesses

    Intruder deducibility constraints with negation. Decidability and application to secured service compositions

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    The problem of finding a mediator to compose secured services has been reduced in our former work to the problem of solving deducibility constraints similar to those employed for cryptographic protocol analysis. We extend in this paper the mediator synthesis procedure by a construction for expressing that some data is not accessible to the mediator. Then we give a decision procedure for verifying that a mediator satisfying this non-disclosure policy can be effectively synthesized. This procedure has been implemented in CL-AtSe, our protocol analysis tool. The procedure extends constraint solving for cryptographic protocol analysis in a significative way as it is able to handle negative deducibility constraints without restriction. In particular it applies to all subterm convergent theories and therefore covers several interesting theories in formal security analysis including encryption, hashing, signature and pairing.Comment: (2012
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