Cash Controls Within Christian Churches: An Exploration Of The Determinants

This paper examines the proposition that local congregations within Western Australia provide satisfactory safeguards aimed at limiting opportunities for mismanagement and fraud. A questionnaire survey was administered to a large sample of local congregations of Christian churches. The aim of the survey was to investigate the extent to which accounting controls were applied in the field of cash collections and disbursements and to determine the influence on cash control performance of various socio‐economic and organisational/administrative variables. An index of cash control performance was constructed and regressed against six surrogate indices obtained by factoring the independent variables. Three indices, namely church funding capacity, central/external influences and local administrative arrangements (particularly those pertaining to employment policy) were found to contribute to the variation in the dependent variable, although the overall explanatory power of the determinants was limited, justifying the need for further consideration of contributing factors.