Fraudulent Refunds by an Employee

This Retailer became suspicious about the number of refunds that were taking place and initially identified 69 "suspicious" transactions. Their investigation resulted in the Defendant being charged with doing 22 fraudulent refunds and taking the cash from those refunds.

The Crown's case relied on four elements:

• the Electronic Point of Sale (EPoS) transaction log
• some short extracts of CCTV
• information from their inventory management system including the results of recent stock takes
• information from their cash office system regarding the cash counted.

My Report addressed each of these issues by showing that:

• the EPoS transaction log could not be relied upon to show who was using the till at any particular time
• the CCTV images were of such poor quality and so fragmented as to add nothing to the Crown's case
• although the headline figures from the recent stock takes appeared to show a high level of accuracy and that the relevant items were missing a more detailed analysis revealed serious discrepancies which meant that they could not be relied upon
• the cash office system did not adequately distinguish between the different tills in the store so it was not possible to show whether any specific till had a cash shortfall or overage for any specific period of time. Further very detailed analysis of the EPoS transaction log revealed that an error in the EPoS system meant that there were occasions when its calculation of the amount of cash that should have been in the drawer was wrong. This meant that none of the cash reconciliation figures could be relied upon.
• my Report also highlighted a further issue in that my analysis showed that two of the Witness Statements gave information that conflicted with the EPoS transaction logs.

The Crown did not present any evidence when the case came to trial.