Separation of Duties

Ensure that duties are separated appropriately.

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 can go a long way.

Make sure your system 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.
  • Fiscal Officers/Approvers review documents for compliance with university policies and procedures, then approve or disapprove.
  • Appropriate staff perform the monthly review of the Ledger in FIS Decision Support and acknowledge the validity of the charges and credits.
  • See PPM Section 330-11 and the KFS Separation of Duties page for more information

Don't let separation of duties and internal controls break down because resources are limited. If you have any questions, please contact Controls & Accountability

Audit and Management Advisory Services is also available to help. Additionally, you can download an internal controls separation of duties matrix


Guide for Separation of Duties

The Ledger Review System is a tool that helps Fiscal Officers focus on high risk/high value transactions as well as help highlight any unusual activity. 

The review also incorporates the Payroll Ledger Review. In order to maintain the separation of duties in the payroll process, the fiscal officer can no longer be the PPS/OPTRS primary preparer or the mandatory reviewer. In addition, KFS will enforce separation of duties by ensuring the initiator and approver are different individuals for financial transactions. Forced routing will not be implemented for Budget Adjustments (BAs), Pre-Encumbrances (PEs) or maintenance documents. The attached matrices have been designed to assist you in structuring proper separation of duties for your department while complying with the Ledger Review System. It is the departments' responsibility to ensure that appropriate controls are in place and there is separation of duties to reduce the risk of improper activities.

The attached matrices have been designed to assist you in structuring proper separation of duties for your department while complying with the Ledger Review System.