Hacker News Reader

Required vacation time is a security best practice, especially for anyone handling money. This makes it more difficult to perpetrate fraud. It also prevents institutional knowledge from being trapped with individuals, as at least one other person must know how to perform the role of the vacationee.

View on HN

Can you explain how it makes it more difficult to perpetuate fraud? I've never worked handling money, so I can't picture how that would be the case.

Say you're a bank employee who handles money. It'd be pretty easy to just slip some off the top of each stack every day and take it home. Or arrange the software to skim some into a separate account and pull that money out often enough that the balance never gets high enough to be suspicious.

Both of those things, plus many more, require daily or weekly effort. If you're out of the office, something will go amiss and you'll get caught.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com