continues. Still, until technology advances once more, the simple steps I explained are entirely reliable in separating the real from the fake. All we have to do is use them.
Chapter 4
[THE THIEF
AT THE NEXT DESK]
An auditor arrived for a routine review of the books at a foreign automotive company that had its offices in New Jersey. The office was one of those tall, angular buildings that seemed to be made entirely of glass. All morning, the man sifted through the voluminous records, matching invoices and payments, and everything seemed to be in good order. But there was one pattern that struck him as a little odd. There were quite a number of bills to replace windows - $600 for this window, $1,200 for that one, $800 for another. Was that normal? Was everyone who worked there a klutz? Well, he shrugged, the building was almost all glass. Glass cracks easily enough.
At lunchtime, he took a break and headed down to the company cafeteria. He selected a seat next to the windows so he could look out on the day. As he was munching on his sandwich, he happened to notice something that made him sit up straight: a date was stamped on the bottom left-hand corner of the glass that signified when the window had been put in. This one had been intact for years. He began to wonder. The auditor got up and proceeded to wander through the building, floor after floor, looking at nothing but windows and the little dates stamped on them. He couldn't find a single one that had been replaced anytime recently.
The auditor confronted the head of maintenance with his findings, and, sure enough, the man was in cahoots with a glass maker in an ongoing embezzlement scheme. The glass maker sent invoices for "ghost" windows that the maintenance head approved. The company paid the bills, and the two of them split the proceeds. This had gone on undetected for a long time.
The maintenance head ended up being quietly fired. The only reason he wasn't prosecuted was because the president of the company was paying him with company money to cut his lawn and do work on his house, and he didn't want that getting out. Months later, when the auditor returned for his next audit, he happened to notice that the man was working at the building across the street. It was all glass.
A DUBIOUS DISTINCTION
There are a million ways that employees embezzle money from their employer, and to catch them it usually takes a stroke of luck like a keen-eyed auditor who happens to take his lunch by the window. And so it is small wonder that, at every imaginable type of business, from the corner deli, to the muffler shop, to the seafood restaurant, to the industrial parts maker, to the leaders of the Fortune 500, employee theft is escalating. Embezzlement has ranked as America's No. 1 financial crime for more than thirty years, and I have no doubt that it will continue to hold that sorry distinction for many years to come. About a third of all the fraud that goes on in this country is embezzlement. Banks, for instance, lose five times more money to embezzlement than to armed robbery. Workplace larceny can be so devastating to the company that is victimized that almost a third of all bankruptcies are attributed to embezzlement.
The dimensions of the problem vastly exceed what the surveys indicate. Only about 10 percent of embezzlement cases ever get reported to the authorities. Many companies, leery of negative publicity, are loath to admit that they have been snookered by their own worker, and simply fire the employee and keep the incident under wraps. They just swallow the loss.
Embezzlement schemes can involve little thefts that run into the hundreds of dollars or large ones that run into the millions. No matter how small they are, they're annoying to the victim. A toy store chain told me about a nimble little scam that had bedeviled one of its store managers. A cashier would peel off a UPC sticker from an inexpensive toy, something like a beanbag for $9.95. He'd stick it on the inside of his wrist. Then an accomplice would come to his register loaded up with forty- and fifty-dollar video games and other more expensive items. The cashier would pick up each of the purchases and swipe his wrist across the scanner while appearing to be swiping the product. So everything went through at $9.95. A sale