A Guide: What to Do When an Employee Steals from You

It’s every business owner’s worst nightmare: employee theft. The financial ramifications of embezzlement, which is its official title, alone are enough to cause vast amounts of stress and worry. Throw in the fact that trust is broken and genuine friendships are ruined as a result of it, and everything about this kind of plight becomes hard to stomach.

You might not be able to repair the relationship that you once shared with the member of your workforce that stole from you, but you can protect your business from further harm as a result of the situation. In order to protect the financial welfare and reputation of your company, you have to take action as soon as you are aware of the fact that a staff member is stealing from you.

Read on to find out what you need to do in the aftermath of employee theft.

Gather all the facts

Before you go in all guns blazing, you need to ensure that you’ve gathered all the facts pertaining to the employee theft that has befallen your business. By not doing so, you could very well end up accusing an employee that has actually done nothing wrong. If this were to happen, you would not only sour the relationship that you share with that particular staff member, but you would also force the rest of your workforce to reconsider their trust in you. How could you expect them to trust you going forward if they believe you are going to accuse them whenever money goes missing?

You also need to gather all the facts so that you have evidence to fall back on should you push forward with court proceedings. This means making copies of invoices and receipts, locating and locking away vital video recordings, and keeping transcriptions of any interviews that you conduct on the matter.

Get yourself a lawyer

You need to deal with your case of employee theft in as swift and effective a manner as possible. If you allow it to linger, people will begin to question how seriously you are taking the situation, and other employees may even slip their hands in your tills if they know that they can get away with it.

To deal with your matter of embezzlement quickly, you need to align yourself with a lawyer that specializes in this field right away. As soon as you possibly can, you should get in touch with a law firm such as thefishmanfirm.com, inform them about everything that has transpired, and provide them with the evidence that you managed to gather about the situation. They will then set about the task of ensuring that your business is reimbursed in full and possibly even compensated for its involvement in the ordeal.

Employee theft is not nice, but it happens. If this problem does, in fact, ever happen to befall you, you need to take action against it right away. If you don’t, not only could you lose a boatload of cash, but you could also end up doing serious damage to your reputation. How are customers and clients going to be able to trust you with their interests if you are unable to deal with people stealing from you right under your nose?

Take the above advice, and don’t take embezzlement lying down.