How to Spot Fraud and Save Money?
Stock counts out, and your competitors are doing better than you. Something seems amiss. Maybe it’s something as simple as you’re having a bad day, or it could be something as terrible as one of your employees is smuggling away paths or clients. Read on to find out what you can do about it, what measures you can put in place and how you can work out what it is that’s going on.
We’ve been pretty lucky in our business in that we haven’t had anyone knocked off anything from us—at least not anyone that we’ve employed—but we deal with a lot of companies that need to have some investigations done to try and work out what is going on. Why did they have this sudden decline in stock counts or a decline in income?
Build a Friendly Environment for Your Employees
There are many ways that you can go about fixing this problem, and the best way is to make sure it’s not introduced to start off with. Having a great level of trust and a relationship where you can be friends but still business friends is a good start, making sure you’re on a first name basis with everyone in the office. You’ve had a beer and a one-on-one conversation with everyone in the office. They know your hobbies, you know theirs and you can engage in some level of conversation.
It’s less likely for someone to be stealing from you if they know you a bit more, and there’s a face to the business. It’s not just you verse them as you’re all in it together. They’re less likely to steal and do things like that—less likely because there are shit people everywhere.
Read: 11 Tips to Help Your Employees Operate at Their Full Potential
Look Into Monitoring Technology
If you happen to have a situation where you think something is amiss, look into technology where you can monitor and pull up data on all of your employees’ activities. It’s things such as screenshots which are recorded consistently every second that they’re actually doing something on the machine. It gives you all of the different auditing information so you can see if they’re opening up Google Chrome, what websites they’re going to, when they went there, how often they went there, etc. The programme that we use for this is called ObserveIT, and it’s an amazing product.
ObserveIT is actually used by the Queensland Police to make sure they can see who’s accessing what records and when so they’re able to make some diagnosis if anyone is abusing the systems, which is cool stuff. It is a really cool IT monitoring tool, and it definitely gives you a good insight into what your employees are doing on their computers.
ObserveIT: A Case Study
We had that put in place in a business in the Southeast Queensland area, and they’re able to find one of their employees who was actually employed by one of their competitors and would be dishing their clients off. That resulted in a court case, and although I don’t like being the bearer of bad news and be like, ‘Hey, look what I found,’ but we got to be that person on some days. It’s better for the business, and that person was obviously rewarded successfully for his misconduct.
Watch: Are Employees an Asset or a Liability?
What Systems Do You Have in Place?
One of the more interesting ways to find out if someone is actually stealing from you is putting in systems that you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of in any way, shape or form ever related to stealing. Another client that we’ve got was having a lot of time taken away by doing all of the time sheets and data entry for payroll.
Instead of having all this time taken away, we put in fingerprint readers. When the staff got there, they would just drop their thumb on this machine. Once the thumb has gone on the machine, it signs them in and when they leave it signs them out. If there’s a window in between the day and they press it, it takes them out for lunch and pops them back in.
That way, they know from an insurance perspective or if there are any fire drills or anything like that, what is the situation, how many people are we accounting for, what is where and who is what. That was something we thought was going to be amazing. It went from two days to do all the payroll down to about two hours.
It was interesting because 5 out of 140 staff members were absolutely against the idea, and they were people who worked with expensive equipment in the inventory. They were like, ‘No, not going to do it. No, you don’t have any right to take my fingerprints.’ They didn’t want to have their thumb on record because they thought that could result in somehow that coming back, they were knocking off stuff. Those staff members were more closely watched through tracking CCTV surveillance that was put in place, and we were able to ascertain that they were stealing items and that resulted in their dismissal.
Read: Warn Your Payroll Officer About This Email Fraud
Assess Their Body Language
The last and final way that I would suggest to try and work out if someone is pulling a barney is, if you’re sitting down and you’re talking to someone, look at their eye movements and their body language and see if that is consistent with someone whom you trust. Hopefully, you have never gone through a situation where you’re talking to someone whom you trusted and then no longer trusted after finding out he or she was lying to you. However, as it happens, shit happens and people lie.
The Final Word
These are just a few hints and tips to know if you’re dealing with someone that you’re a bit suss on. Hopefully, you’ll live in the most trusted industry in the world and that’s never going to be a problem. Hopefully, your employees are not stealing your intellectual property and dishing it off to competitors or knocking off your clients and dishing them out as well.
Anyway, hope you’ve enjoyed this and if you have, make sure to jump onto iTunes and leave us some feedback. Stay good.
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