Download your copy of the new and improved Segregation of Duties Guide today

About the Guide

Segregation of duties, or separating conflicting duty assignments in your government, can help protect your local government's assets. But which duties do you segregate, and what are your options if you cannot feasibly do this? What if you are a very small entity with limited resources?

Our Office recognizes how challenging this can be. So, the Center for Government Innovation, a service of the Office of the Washington State Auditor, created the Segregation of Duties Guide (PDF) to help you get started, no matter your size. In addition to identifying best practices, this resource helps you to:

• Learn which duties should be segregated, within each financial process such as for payroll or inventory
• Understand the financial risks to assets when duties are not segregated
• Identify additional oversight and monitoring steps you might implement when it is not feasible to segregate duties

For very small entities with a one- to three-person accounting department, you might be especially interested in our appendix that includes strategies for small entities.

What's new in the second edition

You’ll find the following improvements in this new edition:

• A federal award section, to help guide you when segregating duties for the common administrative requirements
• The addition of several roles that you should segregate for certain various financial processes
• Expansion of many of the compensating controls throughout the various financial processes, to give you more options to consider
• Clarified and reorganized guidance on using technology to enforce segregation of duties
• Modified examples of small government duty assignments
• More references to resources published since the first edition

How to do your own self-assessment

You can use our self-assessment tool to help you perform and document your own evaluation, which is in our Resource Library. We’ve recently updated this resource as well, and it aligns with the second edition of the guide. If you are not sure where to get started, this might be a great place to assess where your controls are at!

How to reach us for assistance

We hope you find these newly updated resources helpful, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us with your questions, comments or recommendations for new resources at Center@sao.wa.gov.