How to Protect Your Company from Employee Embezzlement

How to Keep Your Company Safe from Thieving Employees 

Companies in the US lose around 5% of their annual revenue to employee fraud. That’s a deep cut into your bottom line. To make matters worse, the bulk majority of companies hit are private and small companies. But what kinds of employee embezzlement attacks are there? And what can you do to protect against them?

Employees can divert some of the business funds to private accounts, commit larceny, conduct fraudulent disbursements, embezzle inventory or raw materials or even steal business information to sell it to competitors. These kinds of acts can seriously cut into not only your bottom line but also your company’s reputation and worker relationships. Here are some of the best ways you can protect your business from employee embezzlement.

Control the cash receipts

If you believe that one of the employees is stealing money, the first step is to keep a detailed log of all of the money coming in and out of your company. Hopefully your company is already doing this and if that is the case, go back and check receipts to ensure every dollar is accounted for. If not, creating a company policy where every receipt is logged and accounted for is essential to identifying if any mismanagement or theft is occurring. This is a great way to battle employee embezzlement and it will allow you to quickly identify if an issue is occurring.

Go for informal audits

If you tried to account for the missing money and are still missing some, you can hire a professional auditor to come in and do a full analysis of your company. Bring an outside firm in to perform an audit without announcing anything to your employees. This works really well because you will have all the information there and ready to go, researched and found by a professional team to backup any case for termination if employee wrong doing is found.

Improve security measures

Look into upping digital as well as non-digital security measures. This means password protecting all sensitive data and information. Furthermore, ensure a log is kept of every employee who has access to any system with sensitive data on it. As for non-digital measures, setup key card locking systems for both areas of the building and storage locations of important data, equipment, and goods.

Manage your inventory very closely

Managing the inventory is a great way to quickly notice any signs of employee embezzlement. Keep a detailed log of each piece of equipment and every box of goods that comes in and out of your company’s possession.

Track your employees, how they work and react

Often times, employees don’t steal for no reason. This isn’t to justify the actions of employees acting illegally. However, it is to say that commmonly the best way to ensure employee embezzlement will not occur is through fostering a healthy relationship with your staff. Problems sometimes emerge in other’s lives that cause otherwise decent, hard working people to do bad things. Ensuring your employees feel safe and comfortable enough with management to share when situations arise is the first step to ensuring your company remains safe. Supervising, and more importantly understanding your employees can help reduce the risk of embezzlement.

If you find it hard to handle employee embezzlement yourself, we are here to help. Tech Masters can improve your company’s anti-employee embezzlement measures quickly and easily. We have more than a decade of experience in the industry and we’ve helped countless business just like yours with all of their IT and security needs. All you have to do is to contact us right now and our team will be more than happy to assist you with the best solutions on the market.