Miriam Sata, the controller of the My Patriot Company, has gone over its inventory
records many times and is concerned that one or more company employees has
stolen large amounts of the company’s inventory. However, she is not absolutely
sure that any theft has actually taken place because large portions of the written and
computer records are missing for unknown reasons. Still, rough calculations, based
on total purchases and sales, show that perhaps 20% of the inventory is missing.
Miriam spoke to her internal auditors and demanded that they give her an
explanation, but they said no explanation was possible without the missing records.
Required:
What should Miriam Sata do? Should she contact the police? Should she hire an
external forensic accountant? How might a forensic accountant help in this case?
Specifically, what could the forensic accountant do that the Miriam’s internal
auditors could not do?