How Taking Vacations Is a Requirement for Transparency

The Forbes paper ‘5 Reasons Why You Need to Make Key Employees Take Their Two-Week Vacations‘ (by the way a very US problem description) makes an interesting point in that it is essential to have employees take vacation for transparency sake – and be replaced in the their position by other people doing the interim.

Examples of large recent frauds in organizations involve people who don’t take vacations, or who don’t make what they are working on accessible to others even if they are taking time off.

It is therefore essential in high risk or stakes environments to have people being replaced at least temporarily by others that would have access to their files. This is an essential fraud prevention lever which I believe is often underestimated by fraud prevention frameworks. And vacations is the right opportunity (in addition to more frequent job rotation, which is another technique used historically by many organizations and governments).

Another reason why taking vacations is mandatory!