After a brief conversation with the human resource director, I headed back to the boxes.

As i drove
back, I remembered seeing receipt books in the boxes, not too many of them, but there were some
in the boxes. However, I didnt remember seeing much in the way of credit card information. I knew
I would remembered if I saw a monthly merchant statement, but what about the individual charge
slips and the terminal close-out slips?
When I arrived I went and found the senior accountant. I discussed the meeting I had the office
manager, and told him I wanted his help looking through the boxes for any credit card activity.
Together we went to the storage room where we found the evidence tape intact across the door. As
he slit the tape to allow us to enter, I recorded the date and time in my notebook. I then retrieved
my notes regarding the contents of each box. The contents were not specific to every item in the
box, but rather provided an overall description of what was within each box
We located two boxes that appeared to contain information we were looking for. One box came
from the womans desk (the crier), and the other originated from the closet where older records
were maintained by the division. I locked the storage room, and we each brought a box into the
room we had been using all along. We emptied the contents of each box onto a separate table and
sorted through the contents. In the first box we found a manual receipt book along with charge slips.
There were no close-out or end-of-day slips, and the receipt book appeared to be only the most
recent book that was still in use when we arrived on the first day. I flipped through the receipt book
and identified two distinct handwriting styles, one much more prominent and frequent than the
other. While not a handwriting expert, the more common handwriting appeared to me to be the
handwriting of a woman. The other handwriting style on the receipt was much rushed and
mechanical. I surmised the frequent handwriting was that the woman, and the less frequent
handwritten receipt were likely completed by the office manager.
As I flipped through the book I also recognized that the payment methods selected for the more
frequent handwriting included cash, check, and charge methods. When I focused only on the second
handwriting style receipt, I didnt see any that were marked paid by credit card or cash. The only
receipt I observed in that handwriting were for payments received by check.
I sorted the charge slips we found, and reviewed each individual slip. There were only a dew slips,
and nothing unusual was noted on them. I figured the slips, and end-of-day close-out reports must
have been forwarded by the woman to the office manager for reconciling and recording into
QuickBooks each day, and there for a folder or file must have existed somewhere with all days
charge slips and close-out reports contained within. It was not to be found in this box.
We turned our attention to the second box. There were two older receipt books in the box. In
flipping through the pages, I noticed the same handwriting styles, with the majority of the receipt
completed in a womans styles of hand writing. Just as we had done with the other box, we looked
for charge slips, terminal close-out slips, and merchant statement, but none were found.

It was starting to look like payments by credit card were not processed, but that would be mean the
divisions revenue should be less than expected based on the number of members and the programs
offered beyond membership. I needed to know if all of the members payments were properly
deposited into the divisios bank accounts.