Stealing a Slice of the Company Pie

Jan. 22, 2009 — -- A reader of this column I'll call Stan received some jarring news upon returning to work after Christmas: His boss had been fired for doubling her paycheck for nearly five months.

"She was not very smart about the way she went about taking the money," wrote Stan, who works as an IT manager at a carpet distributor in Dalton, Ga. "She simply added money to her paycheck since she was in charge of payroll. She was found out by a year-end audit by the company accountant."

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While Stan's former boss faces potential criminal charges, Stan and his coworkers are left holding the emotional bag, wondering why their office manager of two years felt compelled to steal from the company that had trusted her.

"It has been difficult for the office staff to come to terms with the theft," Stan said. "She was our friend and the theft was a violation of that friendship and our trust."

Most people who've been in the workforce at least a few years have a firsthand or secondhand story like Stan's to share. In fact, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners reported in 2008 that U.S. companies lose 7 percent of their annual revenue to employee theft -- from inflating expense reports and abusing company credit cards to selling stolen inventory on eBay and flat-out embezzling.

During economic crises, consumer experts like to warn us about the growing tsunami of scams out there: foreclosure rescue rip-offs, executive marketing shams, bogus home-based jobs, you name it.

But does this mean employers should also expect to see the same diminished ethics from cash-strapped employees feeling the financial pinch? Is this deep recession we're in cultivating a new crop of mini-Madoffs?