Cashier’s cage provides check cashing support

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Tiffany Colburn
  • 39th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
INCIRLIK AIR BASE, Turkey --  The primary mission of the 39th Comptroller Squadron disbursing office is to reimburse contractors with cash and electronic payments for services provided to Incirlik Air Base. They also provide funds to paying agents and change fund custodians in the local area and at geographically separated units.

Currently there are three Airmen working in the disbursing office, one cashier and two disbursing officers.

"In fiscal year 2006, our cashier cashed $15 million in negotiable instruments," said Staff Sgt. Travis Williams, 39th CPTS deputy disbursing officer. "The 39th Comptroller disbursing office is the largest cash disbursing office in the Air Force."

The cashier has many responsibilities that most people don't associate them with.

"Some of the most well-known responsibilities of the cashier are cashing personal checks and doing accommodation exchanges," said Sergeant Williams, "but the cashier also prints U.S. treasury checks, processes collections and disbursement vouchers and is the office records management custodian. Their job does not stop when the window is closed."

Training is important and there are many different levels and areas of training that the cashier and disbursing officer must go through.

"Training includes verifying funds, cashing checks, using the Military Paper Check Conversion database, dishonored check listing and exchanging U.S. dollars for Lira and vice versa. Cashiers must also manually input all vouchers and daily transactions into the Centralized Disbursing System," said Tech. Sgt. Tina Bennett, 39th CPTS deputy disbursing officer. "Training must be done to show the cashier how to input the transactions into CDS and the effect that each item has on their overall balancing."

The cashier is required to have one month of on-the-job training here at Incirlik before considered proficiently trained and training is even longer for disbursing officers.

"The disbursing officer must complete a Defense Finance Accounting Service deputy disbursing officer computer based training course. It gives an overview on assigned duties and responsibilities and tests knowledge of the job. Here at Incirlik the disbursing officers are required to have at least six months on-the-job training before being fully trained," said Sergeant Williams. "We also have to train on resource protection, cash management, controlled area and anti-robbery procedures."

The Finance Cashier's Cage is not the only place on base that cashes checks; some of the other places include the Base Exchange and Consolidated Club.

"We are not the only agency on base that cashes checks, but we are the only agency that cashes checks above $300 and does accommodation exchanges," said Sergeant Williams. "To help alleviate our customer wait times, we do encourage patrons to use the BX and the Club if you need to cash checks smaller than $300."