The correct answer is A. A ghost employee scheme involves adding a fictitious or nonworking person to the payroll so the fraudster can collect wages or salary payments. Data analysis can help detect ghost employees by identifying duplicate, invalid, or suspicious employee information. Multiple employees using the same government or tax identification number is a strong red flag because legitimate employees should generally have unique identifying numbers. Payment tampering involves altering payments after they are initiated, while falsified hours and salary schemes usually involve overstated time worked or unauthorized pay-rate changes for real employees. Fraudulent commission schemes involve manipulating sales or commission records. The ACFE materials specifically identify duplicate government identification numbers as a test for ghost employee schemes.

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The correct answer is C. Electronic payment tampering occurs when an employee improperly alters or creates electronic payments, such as ACH payments, wire transfers, or online banking payments. Reviewing non-payroll payments made to employees is highly effective because employees generally should not receive vendor-style electronic disbursements outside normal payroll or approved reimbursement channels. Such payments can indicate that an employee inserted their own bank account, created an unauthorized payee, or diverted electronic funds. Vendor duplicate confirmations are more relevant to duplicate-payment issues. Customer complaints about late account postings relate more to cash receipts or accounts receivable. Quarterly reconciliations are too infrequent for timely detection. The ACFE materials identify electronic payment tampering as a fraudulent disbursement risk requiring strong monitoring and bank controls.

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The ACFE Fraud Examiners Manual (2020 International Edition) , under the section on Information Security in Electronic Commerce Systems , describes the three primary security goals that must be achieved to protect users and account holders:

Confidentiality

Integrity

Availability

These three goals form the cornerstone of information system protection and are often referred to as the CIA triad .

1. Confidentiality

Confidentiality ensures that sensitive information is accessible only to authorized individuals. The Manual highlights that e-commerce systems must protect customers’ personal and financial data from unauthorized access.

2. Integrity

Integrity requires that the information in the system is accurate and has not been improperly altered. This prevents fraudulent manipulation of records, transactions, and account balances.

3. Availability

Availability ensures that systems and data are accessible to authorized users when needed. This includes preventing disruptions caused by system failures, denial-of-service attacks, or internal sabotage.

These three goals are explicitly documented in the ACFE Manual as essential security requirements for safeguarding electronic financial systems.

Why Option C is the Correct Answer

“Penetrability of data” is NOT an information security goal.

In fact, it is the opposite of what an information security framework seeks to achieve. No section of the ACFE Manual identifies "penetrability" as a required or legitimate objective. Instead, systems should be resistant to penetration attempts.

Thus, Option C does not belong to the CIA model or any ACFE-described security framework.

ACFE Manual Reference

These concepts are covered in the Financial Transactions and Fraud Schemes section discussing information security objectives for e-commerce environments, which identifies confidentiality, integrity, and availability as the foundational goals of secure systems.