Chapter 12, Problem 1EC

Judy Baresford, the store manager of Comfort Futons, noticed that the amount of time the two bookkeepers were spending on accounts receivable, accounts payable, and cash receipts was increasing due to the store’s increase in sales. A friend of Judy’s who is also a store manager suggested that she might want to have some special journals designed that would reduce the amount of work involved in the day-to-day bookkeeping at her store. Judy approached Jon Fortner and Sue Stavio, the bookkeepers, and asked them to come up with a proposal for special journals. During lunch, Jon told Sue he thought designing special journals would be a lot of work and it was not in his job description. Sue told him not to worry because she would just copy pages of special journals from her accounting textbook and they could submit these journals as their own design. Jon liked the idea and they agreed to meet the next night, scan the journals into Word, and submit them to Judy the following morning.

1. 1. Do you think Sue’s suggestion is unethical? Why or why not?
2. 2. In using the generic special journals from Sue’s accounting textbook, what possible problems can you foresee?
3. 3. If you were Judy, how would you respond to Sue and Jon’s “plan”?