Which practice most effectively reduces the opportunity for misuse by a single individual?

• A. Separation of duties.
• B. Centralized control by one person.
• C. Full access granted to all.
• D. No logs kept.

Answer: (A)

Separation of duties is about dividing responsibilities so no single person has control over all steps of a critical process. By distributing authority, verification, and custody across different individuals, you create checks and balances that make misuse harder to both carry out and conceal. For example, in handling cash or approving transactions, one person should initiate or authorize, another should record or reconcile, and a third should handle the assets themselves. This way, a wrongdoing attempt would need collusion or would be caught in another step, reducing the opportunity for a single individual to exploit the system.

The other approaches don’t fit because centralizing control gives one person broad power, increasing the opportunity for misuse; granting full access to all removes necessary barriers and checks; and omitting logs eliminates the audit trail, making detection and accountability nearly impossible.