Theres a powerful embezzlement prevention tool that many big businesses use and that you should probably consider: Require regular vacations of a week or two. (Banks almost always do this.)
This sounds terribly counter-intuitive. But heres the rationale: Some embezzlement schemes are so clever that theyre almost impossible to catch. The one typical weakness of these super-clever schemes, however, is that they usually require ongoing maintenance on the part of the embezzling employee. By making the employee take a vacation, you can see what happens when the employees not around. Here are a couple of examples.
One embezzler (actually my junior high math teacher) who managed a concession stand had a simple but clever technique: He always pocketed a few hundred dollars of cash sales each week. This scheme worked for years. The owner assumed that cash sales were typically about $4,000 a week, even though they were really quite a bit more than that, and that he was losing about $200 a week of ice cream cones, soda pop, and popcorn because of spoilage and, perhaps, a little shoplifting.
The concession stand manager never did take a vacation, but he did eventually have a heart attack. And a funny thing happened. Cash sales increased overnight (literally). Even more dramatic, profits jumped because sales increased while expenses stayed level. When the owner looked into the situation in the employees absence, he figured out that sales and profits had increased because the employee was no longer pilfering cash from the till.
Another embezzler who got tripped up by a vacation requirement was a salesman selling profitable remodeling jobs for a company Ill call ABC Construction. His scheme was to have every fourth or fifth job done by a company he had set up, which Ill call ABC Remodeling. He regularly used the resources and reputation of ABC Construction to sell a remodeling job for ABC Remodeling and thereby collect the 40 percent profit his employer (ABC Construction) would have made rather than his usual 10 percent sales commission.
As long as he stayed in town, his little ploy worked reasonably well. He could answer all his telephone callsboth those from ABC Construction customers and those from ABC Remodeling customersand handle any problems that surfaced for either set of customers. When he went on vacation, however, the whole thing blew up as soon as an ABC Remodeling customer called ABC Construction to ask about a remodeling project in progress.
About the author: CPA Stephen L. Nelson wrote bestselling books on Quicken and QuickBooks. More recently, hes been writing downloadable do-it-yourself guides, including Information about the Corporation, and Costs & Benefits of Incorporation, Incorporating a Business in California, and Incorporating a Business in Illinois.
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