Courts Sales Assistant at Orchard Road Jailed for Amending Invoices So He’ll Get More Commission

By
Shawn Ambrose
-

As any salesperson would know, much of your earnings come from commission.

So, if you want to make more money, there are a few things you can do:

  1. study the art of persuasion
  2. guilt some friends or family members into purchasing your product
  3. break the law

Obviously, option number 3 isn’t a viable course of action, right?

Sure, but for some unknown reason, people continue to choose it.

Courts Sales Assistant at Orchard Road Amended Invoices So He’ll Get More Commission

From 2014 to November 2018, 57-year-old Cai Bangzuan worked as a sales assistant in Courts’ Somerset branch.

Courts has its own computer system, called Navision, which allows employees to track sales invoices and check stock levels.

Cai, too, was given a personal account and unique staff code.

Managers and supervisors’ Navision accounts come with additional access rights to edit sales invoices.

This is how it works:

  1. A customer purchases a product
  2. A sales assistant attending to them will create a sales invoice using their unique staff code
  3. They’ll hand the invoice over to the cashier for payment

The commissions owed to sales assistants for each transaction are tracked by the unique staff code reflected on sales invoices.

Cai, however, misused this system for his own financial gain.

Unbeknownst to his employer, Cai had been editing the sales invoices of other employees by entering his own unique staff code on them so he would get commission for these orders which he did not provide any assistance for.

Since he wasn’t a manager and couldn’t do this on his own, Cai would wait for a manager or supervisor to log into the system and edit the sales invoices if they left the terminal unattended.

Caught Red Handed by Department Manager

Cai’s offences came to light on 13 Nov, 2018, when he was working a shift with a department manager.

At one point, the manager noticed that when Cai was using a computer terminal, it was logged into the account of a sales supervisor, and displayed a sales invoice from an online order.

Cai’s unique staff code was reflected on the invoice, which didn’t make sense as he was a sales assistant.

So, the manager made more checks and found many more online sales invoices reflecting Cai’s code.

Finding it suspicious that a sales staff member working at a retail branch was handling online sales transactions, she confronted Cai, and he confessed to everything.

A Courts branch manager later lodged a police report.

Jailed For Four Months and Two Weeks

Yesterday (19 May), Cai was sentenced to four months and two weeks’ imprisonment for his offences.

The 57-year-old pleaded guilty to six charges of cheating and unauthorised modification or access of computer material. Another eight charges were taken into consideration.

Investigations revealed that Cai had logged into the Navision system using five superiors’ accounts at least 674 times.

In total, he received S$4,396.68 in commissions for orders he did not provide assistance for.

Cai has since made full restitution.

Featured Image: Google Maps 

If you watch at least 10 minutes of brain rot content daily, you must know this:

Read Also:

Advertisements
 
Shawn Ambrose
Email: [email protected]