The Four Seasons Resort Community is an stylish, thriving four-season resort and a community of over 1,200 single family homes, 1,000 time-share units, and a multimillion dollar ski business. Guests visiting the resort will enjoy the indoor/outdoor water park; play golf on one of the two 18-hole championship golf courses; ski, snowboard, or snow tube in the winter on 14 trails that are all lighted for night skiing; or relax at full-service spa. There are also 3 dining rooms, cards rooms, live weekend entertainment and nightly movies.
The resort uses a computerized system to do room reservations and bill customers. Subsequent standard policy for the industry, the resort also offers authorized travel agents a 10% commission on room bookings. Every week, the resort prints an exception report of bookings made by unrecognized travel agents. Thus, the managers frequently pay the commissions anyway, partly because they don't want to anger the travel agencies and partly because the computer file that maintains list of authorized agents is not kept up-to-date.
Although management has not discovered it, various employees are exploiting these circumstances. As often as possible, they call resort from outside phones, pose as travel agents, book rooms for friends and relatives, and collect commissions. The incentive is obvious: rooms costing as little as $100 per day results in payments of $10 per day to the "travel agencies" that book them. The scam has been going on for years, and various guests now book their rooms exclusively through these employees, finding these people particularly courteous and helpful.
Requirements:
1. Would you say this is a computer crime and Why or why not?
2. What internal controls could you recommend that would enable the resort's managers to avoid such offenses?
3. Categorize the controls that you just identified above as either preventive, detective, or corrective controls.
4. How does matter of accountability (tracing transactions to specific agencies) affect problem?