I sit on the Board of Directors of a small not for profit organization, and we’ve been having trouble understanding where our money was going. Our treasurer resigned and we have a new one who looked at the books and was almost ready to quit even before starting. Apparently the financial reports are messed up, the accounts don’t match the bank statements, etc. We need a full audit to straighten things out.
We suspect the audit will reveal some malfeasance on the part of the prior treasurer. We have some strong suspicions our ex-treasurer has been embezzling money from us. Once that occurred to us, it started explaining some of the prior odd behavior we noticed on the treasurer’s part. For example, absolutely nobody was allowed to go to the post office box and get the mail except the treasurer; if you did, the treasurer would throw an insane hissy fit. At the time, none of us were interested in fighting that little “quirk”, but in retrospect, we now realize there was probably something in the P.O. Box the treasurer didn’t want us to see, like alternate bank statements or something.
So, it’s going to take us a while to get the audit going. In the meantime, is there anything specific we should be looking for that might prove to be a smoking gun? For example, we already asked the bank if there were other accounts in our name that we didn’t know about. (No, there weren’t.) What else can we look for? And what do we do if we find something? Suggestions?