I left my fancy “Head of Equities” job at a local brokerage firm a year ago and decided to take charge of the family business, which was near collapse.
It’s been pretty hard, especially dealing with many troublesome employees.
Right now, I want to be sure that they are not steeling from the company, since I’ve had some doubts, and the current controls, checks and balances are insufficient. There is particularly one person that has the ability to steal, since she is the accountant + recieves daily cash, and has illimited access to the accounting system.
Yesterday a friend told me about some lady that got poisoned when a group of her employees that were stealing found out she was starting to know.
Has any of you had this type of trouble? Does any of you have experience with this? Any suggestions or comments are welcome.
Why a person would leave a good job like that to jump onto a sinking ship, I have no idea. I understand it’s the family business and all, but if it was that important, why didn’t you go into the family business in the first place?
I’m sure it’s hard seeing the family business go down like that. But it sounds like it’s headed that way anyway. Get yourself a lifeboat while you can.
Fake hire someone (a friend)…have them be there for 2 weeks…then have two big dudes show up take him to a room and fake beat him to almost death…have him come out being carried by the two guys (with fake blood and everything) and thrown to the curb making sure it’s a huge scene. Have everyone get together and say it was because he was stealing.
My dad had an employee steal a few thousand from him.
Fired the guy and I think threatened a lawsuit, but didn’t go through with it. Was an integral member of the team that had been there a few years. It was kind of the eye-opener for my dad who started his business 15 years ago and had become more passive after installing some middle-management during a tough personal time for him.
His realization was that people don’t care about him and you absolutely have to be able to have the checks in place and make sure people know they are in place. I’m surprised to hear about poisoning, though.
My pop’s business had an employee steal money from his business over the course of a few years. When he found out he fired her and banished her from the community Scarlet letter style. Reprimanding through shame can be devastating.
Thanks for all these comments! The big challenge is to spot if someone is steeling. I guess hiring a good auditor/accountant who checks all bank movements, cash flows and accruals could spot if there are missing or suspicious records. I guess this could be too costly for me, though.
I could try to do it myself, but probably won’t find anything. I have tried in fact, but takes me too long and the volume of transactions makes it impossible to see everything. Also, the people handing me the info are the ones that could be stealing, so it makes it double tough.
Does anyone know any techniques on spotting inside robbers?
I don’t know about that. A lot of small businesses have ONE accountant, who does almost all of the bookkeeping/accounting work. To separate the duties would be really difficult.
My experience lies with bigger organizations where segregation of duties was fairly easy.
What kind of business is it? It sounds a little like a restaurant.
Call the police. Believe it or not, many stations do investigate employee theft for local small businesses. The appearance of an officer coming in to check for ‘shrinkage’ may skirt future attempts to steal.
The company I’m at experienced this, here’s what I would suggest.
Check to see if you have any business insurance that would cover some/all of the loss if indeed theft is taking place. If so, get in contact with them about the ways in which you should collect evidence/documentation.
Also consider contacting your local bank that handles your cash flows or debts because they likely use methods for detecting fraud. Especially if the bank handles your debts they would have an incentive to make sure all is sound.
If you’re trying to detect it, I would start by looking at the accounts payable. For your accounts payable, you want to check if you’re actually paying for something to a business and not just sending out cash into the thiefs account. Go through every vendor and see if they exist (ie. are an actual business) and try to make sure it was an actual product/service that your company purchased. At my job we had this asshole women who was creating fake invoices for fake companies then sending the payments to her bank account.
It’s a small clinic, we have out patient surgery, 5 doctor offices, a small pharmacy (where they can steal stuff) and 7 diagnostics equipments (5 ultrasound, 2 plethysmography), and phyisical therapy.
Some ways they hey can steal are by:
Charging the patient, giving him a fake receipt, and keeping the cash (this would not work for insured patients, since they don’t pay cash, but 40% ouf our patients do pay cash).
Creating fake suppliers.
Stealing medical inputs or merchandise from the pharmacy.
Do you think there are more ways they could rob?
Thanks a lot for the comments, this has been great help.