The money is where the merchandise is

Often I find that my team is focusing too much of their time and efforts on employee theft investigations into things like fraudulent discounts and other types of abuse at point of sale and they forget about the biggest kind of loss, merchandise theft. Don’t get me wrong, discount abuse and other fraudulent activity are important to identify and resolve. They can also be easy to find through some dedicated research, and the hard evidence is usually right there in front of you. This can lead to some solid cases and after a rigorous interview process it can frequently lead to admissions of merchandise theft, cash theft, and other dishonest activity as well. But what about those people who are only taking merchandise?

We catch an enormous amount of shoplifters in contrast to the few internal theft cases that we identify each year. Comparing the amount of time that a shoplifter spends in our building versus the time an average employee spends in our building, the employee has far greater opportunity to steal than the shoplifter does. While we are talking about time, how much of our time do we spend on cameras watching for employee theft opposed to the time we spend hunting for shoplifters? I know for us the difference is huge. So the question begs, how many more internal theft cases could we identify if we focused a little more of our time and surveillance on our employees. Recent surveys have found that 48% of losses are contributed to employee theft, and it has steadily been on the rise since 2008 surveys which contributed about 44% of losses to employee theft. The numbers are staggering. It makes me think we should probably be focusing a little more time and energy on our employee theft investigations.

For more information on employee theft , employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia