healthcare plan, and didn't in any way properly value him. He would practically expect his boss to thank him for taking the money.
By 1990, we reached yet another level of entitlement. When an employee was called in to account for his theft, he wouldn't even bother with explanations or excuses. He would simply shrug his shoulders and say, "So what?"
It's a pretty sad state of affairs, but it's a reality. Another undeniable factor for taking at the office is economic envy. Top executives make so much more than ordinary workers, and there is so much publicity about all the millionaires created from stock options, that some workers rationalize that they deserve their cut. They don't feel that there's anything shameful about robbing the company. A cavalier attitude has taken hold.
SIZE DOESN'T MATTER
By now, I've seen just about every type of scam imaginable, and to my mind, embezzlement is the most difficult to detect. It's a crime of stealth and subterfuge.
Here's a case that typifies so many. There was this small company, doing about $1.7 million in revenues, with just seven employees. The company hired a temporary woman to come in and do some bookkeeping. They liked her well enough that they asked her if she'd like to work full-time. She did and was hired.
Every month, the bank that the company dealt with sent along the company's statement to the president. He faithfully opened it, looked through the checks, and reconciled the account. Then he would tell the bookkeeper, "Here's the statement. I've already gone through it, go ahead and post it." In time, he came to trust the woman enough that he asked her to take care of this chore, which he never much cared for anyway. Fairly quickly, the woman realized that she was balancing the books, and the president didn't even know how much money he had. Each month, she began to write herself a check for one thousand dollars. Sometimes, she wrote one for five thousand dollars, and she made some out for fifteen thousand dollars. She did this for a year and a half. She stole a total of $178,000 from the company.
Finally, she wrote a very large check, and the bank called the company to check on it. For several days in a row, the bookkeeper told the bank that the president wasn't available. Suspicious, the bank officer called the president at home one night. He told him about the check and explained that he wanted to verify it. At this point, the president went through the books and discovered the losses. He prosecuted the secretary, but the bank said they weren't responsible for replacing the stolen funds. The president protested that he would sue the bank, because these were forged checks and the bank should have caught the signatures. The bank explained that it didn't examine checks for as little as $1,000. It would never have seen the signatures of most of the checks. And no one challenged the bank statements sent to the company.
I was asked to testify in the case, and I supported the bank. No bank looks at one-thousand-dollar checks. What's more, the company president was negligent in not going over the statements himself, as he used to do. It was his mistake that allowed the loss to happen.
It's very important to reconcile bank accounts promptly, and always within thirty days of when the statement was mailed. So many companies don't bother to do it. I know there's nothing interesting or fun about reconciling a bank statement. You'd rather read the Congressional Record. But it's important to your financial health. If you fail to reconcile accounts, you've extended an open invitation to employees to embezzle, because they know their actions won't be discovered for a long time, usually after they've resettled in Bermuda.
Unfortunately, that was a small company. A loss like that would probably be enough to bring it to the brink of bankruptcy. If you're Delta Airlines and somebody rips you off for $250,000, you contact your insurance company and tell it that the bank refuses to cover your loss. The insurance company says, okay, here's $150,000, your loss minus your $100,000 deductible. Then Delta takes the loss off of its taxes and ends up being shortchanged $50,000, which it can certainly absorb as part of its operating costs.
But if you own six dry cleaning stores, and an employee embezzles $50,000 and takes off with her boyfriend, the bank's not going to give it to you and you're through. The