Protecting the Offering Plate: Safeguarding Your Church from Financial Fraud

Unlock the secrets to safeguarding your church's finances in this eye-opening episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I'm Todd Rhoades, co-founder of Chemistry Staffing, and today, we confront the unsettling reality of theft and fraud targeting churches. With recent incidents making headlines, such as the arrest of individuals stealing over $25,000 from Detroit metro churches, it's clear that we must be proactive. We'll explore six vital strategies to protect your church, including enhancing internal controls, securing physical spaces, and educating your staff and volunteers. Discover how adopting digital giving options can reduce the risk of financial misconduct and make your church less vulnerable to internal threats.

Prepare to fortify your church's financial integrity as we cover the importance of regular audits and their role in uncovering weaknesses that could otherwise go unnoticed. Learn how conducting these audits not only bolsters confidence among church leadership and congregants but also deters potential fraudulent activities. We'll also delve into the necessity of staying alert to scams that seem too good to be true, which often prey on unsuspecting churches. Whether you're leading a congregation or simply concerned about financial stewardship, this episode provides essential insights to maintain transparency and security within your church community.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Hi there, welcome to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name is Todd Yates, one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffingcom, and today we're going to talk about something that I don't even like to think about, but unfortunately it happens. It happens, you read it in the headlines, you've heard about it at churches and it's just a horrible thing is what happens. But we're talking about churches that are target can be targets for theft and for fraud, and I was reading a story over out of I believe it was the Detroit News just recently that five individuals were arrested for stealing over $25,000 from churches in the metro Detroit area. And how did they do it? They were pretty tricky with it, everything from stealing checks, from offering plates to creating fake debit cards. They engaged in wire fraud. I mean it's sobering. It's just a sobering reminder that we need to be vigilant about protecting our church's finances. So today I want to talk about just six really quick things that you can do, some safeguards that you can put into place about protecting your church's finances so that these kind of things don't happen. Okay, six things. Okay, I'm going to rattle through these very quickly.

Speaker 1: 1:21

First of all and this almost shouldn't have to be said but strengthen your internal controls. Implement those checks and balances in your financial processes. Have multiple people involved in counting offerings and reconciling bank accounts and authorizing expenditures, and those people should not all be the same people. You should have different people counting, different people reconciling different people authorizing expenditures. But that's all part of just having some really strong internal controls. So that's the first thing. Second thing is just secure your physical space. Limit access to areas where offerings are collected and stored and counted. Maybe even consider installing security cameras and alarms in those places. So secure your physical space. Third, educate your staff and your volunteers. Make sure that everybody's aware of the potential for fraud and the importance of reporting any suspicious activities. So this goes not just and when we're talking about staff and volunteers, this goes not just with collecting offerings and counting offerings and make sure that's secure and that all that stuff gets to the bank on time and is all reconciled, but it also includes financial safeguards with your staff and your volunteers, those that are administering your budgets. You need to make sure you have controls there and educate your staff on how to do that okay, so that there's not loose accounting practices there that maybe allow staff or volunteers to do something that maybe they shouldn't be doing. Okay, so that's number three. Number four if you haven't already done so, go digital. Encourage online giving and electronic fund transfers. This is one of the unforeseen kind of advantages of going digital. It can reduce the actual handling of cash and checks and it really does make it harder, at least for internal thieves, to operate inside your church, because it's done electronically and digitally. Okay, so that's number four.

Speaker 1: 3:20

Number five conduct regular audits. There's just a huge church that was in the news just in the past couple of days, in the past week a hundred million dollar budget. They said they were given 15 to 20%, I believe, to their missions, but they had, I guess a whistleblower came out and said no, they didn't do that, they didn't do that at all and they never conducted audits. The church is saying, no, we did conduct I don't know what the truth is there audits. And the church is saying, no, we did conduct, I don't know what the truth is there.

Speaker 1: 3:53

But if you don't conduct regular audits, you're vulnerable. You're vulnerable to attack, you're vulnerable to people questioning where the money goes and, honestly, if you don't do a regular audit, at least every couple of years, I don't know that you have confidence that everything is good. An external audit will bring anything to light that somebody that doesn't have a dog in your church's finances can come and say here are some areas that you need to improve in or here are some areas that you're vulnerable. It's very important and it also external audits will provide confidence, both for you internally on your staff and your leadership and your elder board, your board of administration or whatever but also with your congregation. So conduct regular audits.

Speaker 1: 4:33

And then, sixth, beware of too good to be true scams and offers Scammers often target churches with promises of money or miraculous investments. I know you think you wouldn't be open to this, but, man, I've seen so many churches fall for this. It sounds almost too good to be true and if it does, it probably is. So here's the bottom line for today Protecting your church's finances. It's absolutely crucial to maintain trust and ensuring that your resources are used to further your mission at your church, both locally and globally. So take steps today. That's the bottom line, that's the action step. Take steps today to strengthen your security measures and to prevent fraud. Here's maybe a step that you can take If you feel like you are vulnerable in this area, like maybe those six things that I went through.

Speaker 1: 5:20

Maybe you need to work on two or three of these. If you set the agenda for your next board meeting or your elder meeting, put that on the agenda right now. Just whip out your agenda, pop it on there so that you can start this conversation. If you'd like to have me be a part of that conversation with your church, I'd be happy to Just reach out to me at podcastchemistrystandingcom. This is important. This is important, and if there's a breach, it's too late to put these controls into play. You lose credibility, you lose trust, you probably lose money and credibility. So now is the time. If you feel like your church has grown a little lax in some of your financial controls and security, now is the time to put that on the agenda and start that conversation. It's really that important. Okay, that's it for today. I hope this was helpful to you. Any feedback or anything for me? I'd love to hear it. Reach me at podcasttennistrestaffingcom. Thanks, we'll be back tomorrow. Hope you'll join us. You.