Is lax management causing employee theft in Atlanta GA?

Internal theft, also known as employee theft, causes close to 50% of retail business loss each year. In the thirty years of preforming employee theft investigations I am still shocked by what a poor job most businesses do in common sense loss prevention. A good example of one of the instances was an employee theft investigation that I did where $5000 in fraudulent business checks were cashed. It turned out that the back stock of checks were unsecure in a storeroom with office supplies. Janitor’s stole20 some checks from the middle of the stack waited a month and them began to cash them. Those checks should have been secured under lock and key with strict access.

Every day we drop our guard because it is more difficult to do it the right way. Doing it the right way will prevent employee theft. The key is “prevention”. Or we say, “oh I trust that person, they would never do that”. Those words get more and more businesses in trouble everyday. When a management person says that they are basically saying that they have no common business sense.

Another case involved employees that stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in product from a distribution center they worked in. They were given keys to the facility that had millions of dollars of merchandise in it, with no alarm system. So coming back at night and loading up a truck was easy.

Internal theft or employee theft lurks around every corner. You have to be proactive to prevent it. Internal theft will not go away or stop on its own. In fact it will get worse. Get your policy manual off the shelf, dust it off, update it and make sure people understand that this is your “business bible”, live it and enforce it. That does not mean that it never changes, far from it. As your business changes your policy and procedures should change.

For more information on an employee theft investigation in Atlanta, GA contact us or call 1.770.426.0547