Flint Hills Middle School wants to raise money for a new sound system for its auditorium. The primary fund-raising event is a dance at which the famous disc jockey Jay Dee will play classic and not-so-classic dance tunes. Trent Greeley, the music and theater instructor, has been given the responsibility for coordinating the fund-raising efforts. This is Trent's first experience with fund-raising. He decides to put the eighth-grade choir in charge of the event; he will be a relatively passive observer.
Trent had 500 unnumbered tickets printed for the dance. He left the tickets in a box on his desk and told the choir students to take as many tickets as they thought they could sell for $5 each. In order to ensure that no extra tickets would be floating around, he told them to dispose of any unsold tickets. When the students received payment for the tickets, they were to bring the cash back to Trent, and he would put it in a locked box in his desk drawer.
Some of the students were responsible for decorating the gymnasium for the dance. Trent gave each of them a key to the money box and told them that if they took money out to purchase materials, they should put a note in the box saying how much they took and what it was used for. After two weeks, the money box appeared to be getting full, so Trent asked Sandy Overbay to count the money, prepare a deposit slip, and deposit the money in a bank account Trent had opened.
The day of the dance, Trent wrote a check from the account to pay Jay Dee. The DJ said, however, that he accepted only cash and did not give receipts. So Trent took $200 out of the cash box and gave it to Jay. At the dance, Trent had Deb Younger working at the entrance to the gymnasium, collecting tickets from students and selling tickets to those who had not pre-purchased them. Trent estimated that 400 students attended the dance.
The following day, Trent closed out the bank account, which had $250 in it, and gave that amount plus the $180 in the cash box to Principal Ramirez. Principal Ramirez seemed surprised that, after generating roughly $2,000 in sales, the dance netted only $430 in cash. Trent did not know how to respond.
Identify as many internal control weaknesses as you can in this scenario, and suggest how each could be addressed.