You are an internal auditor at Alpha Corporation, a medium-sized retailer specializing in electronics, home goods, and small appliances. AlphaCorp operates mainly through an online platform and a catalog-based system but also has a small educational arm offering online courses in various subjects.
As the internal auditor, you're responsible for assessing the internal controls across various departments:
Cash Receipts: Payments arrive at the general mail room. The mail room is always bustling and employs 45 clerks. They sort through the mail, open customer payment envelopes, reconcile checks and remittance advices, and then send them to the Accounts Receivable (AR) department.
The AR clerk manually prepares a remittance list and sends checks and the list to the treasurer for deposit.
Financial Aid Office: John Smith is the sole person managing the educational arm's financial aid program. He receives applications, makes decisions on eligibility, writes checks from an account he solely controls, and has students pick up their financial aid checks in person from his office.
Purchasing Department: Agents in this department have sole discretion in selecting vendors.
Rumors have been circulating that some agents may be receiving gifts or kickbacks from certain vendors, affecting their choice of suppliers.
Warehouse and Shipping: Warehouse clerks receive two copies of a stock release document from the sales department. They pick items from the shelves and update an inventory subsidiary ledger from their PC. Clerks also prepare purchase orders for items that fall below their reorder points and send these directly to vendors. Items picked are then sent to the shipping department.
Mail Room: Clerks open envelopes containing customer payments for credit card balances. They separate remittance advices and checks into two piles. Checks are sent to the cash receipts department. Mail room clerks reconcile batch totals of cash received with accounts receivable each night.
Recently, Mike Brown, a new mail room clerk, was found to have exploited a weakness in the system to steal $100.000 in customer payments. He only worked for one month and then vanished. Upon review, it was found that he targeted checks made out to a shorthand version of the company's name and checks where the payee section was left blank.

Questions:
Create a comprehensive systems flowchart that captures the workflow across these five departments.

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

Alpha Corporation Workflow Overview Comprehensive Systems ... View the full answer