You cannot afford to trust your church secretary

If you are the pastor or a church leader and your church secretary handles the church's money, makes deposits, pays bills, has some degree of control over invoices, payments, or church credit cards you cannot trust him or her. Better put, you should not act as if you trust him or her and would be foolish and negligent to do so.

Former church secretary indicted for theft.

This is a sad story on several levels. The lifelong member of an Alabama Baptist church who was the church secretary and who had control over the church's credit card is alleged to have stolen $129,000 from the church over the past 33 months. The amount of theft might be greater, since the statute of limitations on such crimes only goes back to 2011. Authorities are reported to have said that the fraudulent charges may go back another four years to 2007. From July 2011 through April 2014 the secretary made 2,200 transactions on the credit card many of which were determined to be fraudulent. That number of transactions is about three every single working day. The secretary, a mother, grandmother, and widow apparently used the card to pay her personal bills - utilities, gas, travel, etc.

There's no mystery about trusted people stealing - happens all the time. If the opportunity is present Christians who are otherwise perfectly respectable followers of Christ, beloved friends and family, valuable church members and servants of the Lord will shamelessly steal from the church. Apparently, the woman had absolutely no accountability for the credit card. The pastor, deacons, finance committee all of whom are to be held secondarily responsible for the loss, failed the church by not having sufficient financial controls in place. The woman merely shifted around some budget figures to cover herself but every credit card transaction has a record and appears on some statement. Evidently, no one checked the statement, ever, to verify the transactions were for church business. A handful of questionable transactions might be buried in a statement that wasn't checked too closely, but thousands? Utter failure on the part of church leadership.

To its credit, the pastor and leaders of the church decided to press charges. The woman was stealing from every church member who worked hard to earn money part of which they gave to the Lord's work through the church. Whatever sympathy one might have for the alleged thief should be tempered with the sober thought that hardly a day passed when she didn't deliberately steal from her friends, family, and neighbors.

Most SBC churches probably do not have a business credit card for the church. Those that do should have regular audits no matter how trusted the church financial secretary is or how long they have been around. A sensible financial secretary would insist on regular audits of some sort. This isn't brain surgery.

Money is important. There are around 46,000 SBC churches which handle tens of billions of contributions. In the great majority of these churches employ only one clergy staff, the pastor. It is his job to see to it that there are sufficient and proper money handling policies and procedures. The church involved in this case, depressingly similar to many others, was a large, multiple staff church. It is shocking that such a church failed to have control over its finances.

There are this very Lord's Day probably dozens if not hundreds of SBC churches where some trusted individual is stealing from the church. This sort of thing is so common I don't even look to blog about a case of such theft unless it gets into six figures.

Hey you, Spurgeon! You might spend less time preaching on stealing from God, the standard approach to preaching on tithing, and more time ensuring that proper financial controls are in place. It's your responsibility.

Need more?

Woman steals $130,000 from Baptist association (Nice round figure, $130,000, and in Alabama also.)

Stealing from the church, your church

Dear pastor, please rouse yourself from plumbing the depths of the hypostatic union and from filling your mind with other highly spiritual thoughts and give some attention to the grimy, mundane matter of church business.

There's a good chance that one of you leads a church where a trusted administrative assistant, financial secretary, or bookeeper is stealing your church, God's church, blind.

Former church bookkeper facing prison time for embezzlement

The details of this recent story are depressingly consistent with most all of the others that are regularly reported. A trusted church employee is caught stealing funds from the church, hundreds of thousands of dollars, over many years.

In the case linked above the amount was estimated at $300,000 over a period of years. The church bookkeeper is reported to have used numerous methods to steal. One report says that she would simply transfer money from the church's bank account to an account of a family member.

Banks keep up with these things, you know. Any movement into or out of a bank account has a trail. How about you initiating a simple audit and have either an accountant  or even members of a church finance committee sniff around, check bank transfers, scrutinize checks that are written, and reconcile bank deposit slips with actual deposits. 

If your church were to be a victim of such embezzlement I doubt that you would be held responsible by the congregation. But you are the leader. If you church is like most SBC churches you are the only full time staff member. You may not like it but it is part of your job to see that proper internal controls are put in place that would avoid theft like the one featured above.

Chances are, someone who reads this blog is in a church where someone is stealing from you. It is that widespread. Most of the time the thief is not all that sophisticated and it would not take much to catch him or her. 

I used to have a member of my church who was the manager of a large toy store. He told me that every year during the Christmas buying season, he would be able to find an employee, perhaps a cashier, stock person, or other employee, who was stealing. He would work with police to gather evidence and then arrange for them to come during store hours and arrest the employee publicly , perp walk and all,  so that all other employees would see and know. This was a pretty strong deterrent.

In the same way, a church employee caught stealing should be prosecuted and punished. You can handle forgiveness any way you choose, just make restitution a part of the process.

People in your church work hard and give generously. You owe it to them to take the steps necessary to ensure that it is not easy to just steal their money and God's money. Alas, when pastors address the matter of stealing from the church, they usually have a sermon on tithing in mind. You can do both, my friend.

Get with it. Now would be a good time to start.

Is your church secretary stealing from the church?

Two things are true about that question:

1. She is almost certainly not.
2. For someone who reads this blog, she is.

And here's what is happening in your church, with the Lord's money and you don't know about it:

She handles all the books, pays the bills, writes the checks, gets the bank statements. What is happening is that she is writing checks to a dummy vendor, perhaps with a name that sounds 'right' if someone looked at it, and deposits it in an account that she controls. She then writes checks out of that to herself. Or, she is writing checks to herself or a family member but changing the payee when the check is entered into the accounting software so that when statements are run everything looks normal. And she knows that no one besides herself ever looks at the bank statements. Or, she has a private supply of checks and she tosses out the ones that are legitimately signed by one or two church officials and rewrites her own and forges the signatures.

She can get away with this until some bill goes unpaid or until someone smells something foul and takes minimal initiative to ask questions and look at actual records. 

But you, Spurgeon are too busy with your nose in some dusty commentary to educate yourself on church finances. Besides that, you don't want to soil your dainty hands with tedious administrative duties. 

OK, genius, just wait around until you've had tens of thousands of dollars stolen from the church. You can always be the white knight in offering support and forgiveness to the thief while the church has to figure out a way to get back to solvency. 

If you are going to pastor a church with a budget of $100,000, $200,000 and upward, and you are the only full time staff, and you are the one who sees to it that policies are in place, you better educate yourself.

I have relatives who are CPAs and one was an internal auditor for a Baptist university. While he did not run across anything more than sloppy accounting and money handling practices at that job, he has sufficient experience to have quite a view of honesty in the workplace, including churches and religiously based institutions. 

Here's his rule of thumb for workplace theft:

• 10% of employees will always steal from you.
• 10% of employees will never steal from you.
• 80% of employees will steal if the circumstances are right.

I think he is a bit low. I read where 30% are already stealing from their employer and another 60% would if the situation was right.

"Aha," sayeth my clergy colleagues, "Christians are more honest and those with church jobs are certainly more honest in dealing with the Lord's money."

Uh, no, brethren. You must presume not. If your thinking as a pastor is that you trust the folks who handle the money and write the checks, probably folks for whom you are their shepherd and pastor, that is good. If your practice is that you trust these folks, that is bad and you are as dumb as a stump. 

At some point in a 30 or 40 year pastoral career, you will have folks stealing from the church. Sadly, you probably will not even know it.

There are simple solutions to most of this that doesn't involve outside auditors, CPAs, or finance experts.

• Have a committee look over the bank statements once a year. 
• Divide up responsibilities for collecting, counting, and depositing the money. 
• Don't let one guy count the money and make the deposit.
• Don't let one guy have access to the deposit where he can take out cash and then remake the deposit slip which is not duplicated.
• Pastor, either you or someone or some committee ought to look at every check written occasionally. You can easily generate a report with this. 
• Go to the bank and get a list of accounts linked to the church and see if there are any you are unaware of.
• Physically reconcile the balances on the church financial statements, the one your bookeeper generates with what is actually in the bank.

You will save yourself some grief down the road.

Here is the latest: Woman steals $130,000 from Baptist Association

There's even a CPA who has a blog called Church and School Embezzlement. Read all about it.