Open Forum

Definitely collections staff to inventory the collection.  What reason did the auditors give?

They did not give a reason. The auditors made is seem like it was common practice for inventorying the collection be performed on a periodic basis by someone independent of the curatorial department.

In my experience, auditors are not accustomed to thinking about artifact collections as uncapitalized assets. For other asset categories, it is definitely important to ensure there is no internal theft. Plus, given the British Museum's recent news headlines, some are more aware of the risks of internal theft.

 Here's what I would do:

1) Make sure the collection is not listed as an asset on the balance sheet (unless you intentionally capitalize your collection). Here's a resource about that from AASLH: https://aaslh.org/understanding-valuing-history-collections/

2) Expand your inventory section to include different types of inventory - one of which would be a spot check inventory as @john mccabe mentioned in this thread.  The spot check usually involves a person outside of the collections department selecting a random set of objects from the collection catalog, and then the two of you find them together. This could be someone from your security team, a board member - like the chair of the finance committee-, or another person in your community with risk management or finance experience.

Erin

I don't find this as much of a red flag as other have.

At my institution, collections management staff are responsible for full, rolling inventories.  But we also complete spot-check inventories about four times per year with collections management staff accompanied by one or two staff members from our Finance Department.  This is in no way monetizing or valuing the collection; the Finance Department is just involved in all sorts of institutional auditing.  We randomly generate a short list of objects from our collections management database, and our collections staff take the Finance staff to our storage areas and galleries to physically locate the objects.  Then as they are in the galleries and storage, they choose a small group of objects for which we then print out database information.  We call them "picks" and "finds."  One of the four times per year, we have an outside firm that audits non-profits accompany our Finance staff, and we do a larger group of "picks" and "finds."  The outside auditors audit a number of financial and workflow procedures when they are here once per year.

For us, the "picks" and "finds" ensure that our object locations are correct in the database, and that we have written records (even skeletal) that match up with physical objects.  The Finance people aren't checking for completeness of cataloguing--just that we have some kind of a record in the database.

So for us, it's no problem to have Finance people in collections storage, NOT handling objects of course, but always escorted and let into storage by collections staff, and only for auditing purposes.

Feel free to contact me with any other questions.

Kind regards,

Leslie Ory Lewellen

I agree with everyone else that it isn't a common occurrence for regular inventory to be outside of the department. Surprise spot checks are more common with auditors. As Erin noted this did lead me to discover at one museum that they had in fact historically been monetizing their collection. A situation that we then remedied over the next fiscal year. So it is a good thing to check on. 

You are likely already giving inventory updates and reports to your collections committee members and director as well. Those reports should be shared with the auditors. And, those committee members could also take part in an annual spot check.  Many CMS systems will take a random sampling or they can choose their own. We used to look for two dozen during our annual audits.