Small Business and Employee Theft

To lose money due to a bad investment decision is one thing, but to lose money because a trusted employee embezzled funds from you is like a double whammy. Losing $100,000 due to employee theft may be peanuts to a big corporation, but can mean the very survival of a small business. It can be an accountant pocketing the money, or an assistant writing checks and forging the business owner's signature. Whatever it is, loss from employee theft -- for a small business -- can be devastating.

Employee theft in small businesses is prevalent, but hard to detect. A survey done by Auditors Inc. of about 1,000 CPA professionals find that as many as 40% of small businesses have experiencd employee theft in one form or the other. However, only about 2% report the crime. Small businesses are ripe targets of employee theft mainly because of size; they do not have measures and safeguards to protect itself from employee theft.

Ruth S. Crane of Auditors Inc. in Wheaton, Maryland has released a book entitled "Embezzlement 101: How to Embezzle from your Employer and Not Get Caught and How to Detect It." Crane says following the principles will only take an hour of work per week and will virtually guarantee a small-business owner can catch the fraud within 30 days.

Download the 14-page PDF report