Despite the enormous number of transactions processed daily by banks nowadays, if a customer's bank account is accide...

Brendan on July 11, 2017

Writing this post so I can alert the instructors. Thank you

Mehran on August 31, 2017

Hi @Brendan, thanks for your posts and apologies for the delayed reply.

This is a Strengthen question. Let's assess the stimulus first.

The stimulus contains an argument. The conclusion is: "it is extremely unlikely that [an erroneous bank credit of a large sum of money] will not be detected by the bank's internal audit procedures." There is no real support of this conclusion in the stimulus itself. The first part of the sentence speaks about the number of transactions processed daily; the conclusion is about internal audit procedures. These two things are not the same.

So, let's look to the answer choices to try to bolster this poor argument.

Answer choice (A) does the trick. It explains that, although "all transactions" are processed initially with one set of computer programs, a *different set* of programs double-check large transactions. In other words, a different set of programs audit large transactions. If you plugged this sentence into the stimulus, it would strengthen the overall argument.

Answer choice (B) is irrelevant, because it does not speak to the bank's internal audit procedures at all. In addition, it is entirely possible that a customer's bank account could be accidentally credited with a large sum of money without the customer herself making the deposit, right? How would the fact presented in (B) be useful, there?

Hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any additional questions.

Minerva on July 18, 2019

Hi, could you please explain why D is wrong? Thanks!

Irina on July 18, 2019

@Minerva,

(D) is incorrect because it does not strengthen the argument. The argument focuses on the bank's internal audit procedures, a ratio of auditors to customer accounts it itself is not indicative of strong or weak internal controls without additional information. Fewer auditors using more sophisticated software are preferable to more auditors reviewing accounts by hand. The statement itself is also rather weak - "has slowly increased over the past 100 years." We cannot quantify how slowly, and to me such weak language suggests that this increase is immaterial to actually have any impact on the bank's rate of error detection.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Josh on May 13, 2020

My apologies, but I don't quite understand how A strengthen's the argument (I guessed and felt all of them were irrelevant at the time). I'm not sure how a different set of programs has anything to do with an audit program being internal or not? Maybe I'm hung up on the wrong thing here, and I know I'm wrong, but I just don't understand how A is relevant. Any chance someone could break it down for me?