Separation of Duties ensures that no one person has complete control over a financial transaction; at least two employees have reviewed and approved a transaction.

Why is Separation of Duties important?

In addition to the aforementioned reasons of ensuring proper system controls, Accounting & Financial Services (A&FS) is in the process of implementing a new Ledger Review system in 2015. This new Ledger Review system will be required starting with the July 2015 ledgers. See also the Controls and Accountability information page.

How is Separation of Duties enforced?

As of 2015, most department-initiated documents involving financial transactions (excluding Budget Adjustment, Internal Billing, and Pre-Encumbrance documents) will require a separate initiator and approver. In other words, if a Fiscal Officer initiates a document, KFS will require one of their delegates to approve that document (it will route to the primary delegate automatically, but a non-primary delegate can approve as well by selecting the appropriate drop-down menu option in their KFS Action List;  If there isn’t a primary delegate assigned to the account, any one of the secondary delegates will be able to approve the document). For documents initiated by an Account Delegate, the Fiscal Officer or another Delegate would need to approve the document to satisfy separation of duties. If a Fiscal Officer initiates a document for which there is no account delegate, they will receive a warning message advising them that a Delegate must be assigned to the account in order to submit the document. They will not be able to submit the document until a delegate has been assigned to the account.

The best practice is for a non-Fiscal Officer/non-Account Delegate to initiate KFS documents, but in the situations where this is not possible, KFS will ensure that two individuals have been involved in the approval of that document.

How can I ensure I have Delegates assigned to my Accounts?

Run the Account Delegate (167) report in FIS Decision Support now in order to ensure that each of your accounts has one or more Account Delegates. Create Account Delegate or Account Delegate Global documents as needed to add and/or update the delegate records for your accounts.