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Separation of Duties

Ensuring that duties are separated appropriately within your unit is particularly important when resources are limited. No one person should have complete control over any transaction, and each person's work should be a complementary check on another's work.

Why is this so important? It ensures the integrity of our financial information by correcting errors and omissions as well as deterring improper activities such as fraud and misuse. The costs of improper activities are quite high. Even losses of a few hundred dollars result in recovery costs of tens of thousands of dollars from investigations, employment actions, grievances, lawsuits, recruitments and training. An ounce of prevention is truly worth a ton of cure!

Make sure your DaFIS users are properly trained and understand the appropriate policies and the importance of their roles:

• Document Initiators are expected to prepare transactions accurately and appropriately, in compliance with policies and procedures.
• Account Managers / Approvers review documents for compliance with university policies and procedures, then approve or disapprove.
• Transaction Listing Reviewers perform the monthly review of the Ledger in Decision Support and certify the validity of the charges and credits. PPM Section 330-11 requires that the person approving DaFIS requisitions, departmental purchase orders, and accounts payable documents for payment shall be someone other than the person performing the monthly ledger review in Decision Support. By separating these roles, the Approver is saying that what gets recorded on the Ledger is appropriate and the Reviewer is confirming that what's on the Ledger is valid.

Don't let separation of duties and internal controls break down because resources are limited. Contact John Gregg at (530) 752-3255 or e-mail him at jwgregg@ucdavis.edu if you have any questions. Internal Audit Services is also available to help. You can also download an internal controls separation of duties matrix.