Issue link: http://psai.uberflip.com/i/1083303
W EEKLY EDITION FEBRUARY 20, 2019 Dealing with Employee Theft By PSAI Executive Director Karleen Kos Discovering theft. In most cases of employee theft, the evidence is in front of you if you monitor things carefully by managing the operation using "trus t but verify" as your approach. Knowing where each and every unit in your inventory is placed, personally viewing cancelled checks – which is so much easier to do in the electronic world – and having systems that account for your tools and equipment tend t o reduce the opportunity for theft. Still, a really desperate employee dedicated to finding a way around your controls will probably find some way to steal. So you also need to watch for things like: • Changes in your cash flow or business results that don' t square with what has been "normal' or what you would have expected. • Changes in employee spending patterns such as buying a lot of new things, taking trips, or talking about money in new ways. Especially watch this if they are buying/spending on things o thers in their role can't afford, and they explain it with stories about relatives giving them money, winning at scratch ball or a bet on football, and other "lucky" breaks. Any of these could happen to someone, but if there's a pattern of unusual luckines s, pay attention. • Other employees complaining about missing items should be a red flag. Sure, any pen or stapler can go missing – and maybe you don't even care if they do. But if you see a pattern of it, pay attention because following the trail can lead to unexpected discoveries. For example, I once led an organization with 6 locations on a single campus, and everyone was constantly complaining we had no pens. I decided to buy a huge amount of pens in bulk to make sure we had enough. Once the pens were di stributed and the excess inventory was stored, I forgot about it until a couple of short months later when everyone was again complaining we were out of pens. Now, pens aren't a big deal until they are. Getting to the bottom of the "Great Pen Shrinkage Cap er" taught me some things about how the organization worked – or didn't work – and we had to make some management process changes. We also got the pens back (1000 of them!) and nobody lost their job. Sometimes, you're not so lucky. If I had discovered thos e pens were being pilfered by one or two specific people and taken off the campus for non - approved purposes, I'd have had to take disciplinary action (at least). P AGE 2 CONTINUED ON PAGE 7