When a grandmother recently admitted to stealing $280,000 from her employer, she told police she just didn’t have enough money to pay all her credit card bills…and she needed to buy her grandkids some gifts. Her only mistake….”I said things I shouldn’t have said some things to police.”
More recently a housekeeper was arrested for stealing jewelry from clients while cleaning apartments.
In a recent study, more than half of resumes and job applications contain lies. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the resumes that are just misleading. For example:
- 21 percent offer fraudulent degrees
- 29 percent show altered employment dates
- 40 percent exaggerate salary
- 7 percent of candidates have a felony record
- 3 percent tested positive for illegal drugs.
Finding out the truth after the job applicant becomes an employee is not only a headache but a major source of the type of public relations you don’t want. Here are a few more recent incidents of employee theft that seem to been front page news lately.
- A laborer steals $40,000 of concrete forms from his employer and re-sells them.
- A dental assistant forges her employer’s signature and deposits checks worth over $21,000 into her personal account.
- A distribution center supervisor uses her company credit card to pay personal expenses such as gas, groceries, and gifts.
What’s the point? Employees are helping themselves to company funds costing U.S. businesses over $100 trillion annually, according to a report from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and other sources. Forty-three percent of inventory shrinkage is the result of employee theft, more than shoplifting. Reports also reveal that more than 46 percent of all workplace fraud happens to small businesses with fewer than 100 employees.
The U.S. Department of Justice estimated not too long ago that employee theft is growing by as much as 15 percent each year. According to an Auditors Inc. survey of 1,000 certified public accountants, as many as 40 percent of small-business owners are embezzlement victims. And up to 30 percent of the nation’s workers will steal at some time in their career, with up to 75 percent of all employee theft going unnoticed, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Education doesn’t seem to matter much. An equal number of culprits are high school and college grads.
When you add it all up, businesses lose 7 percent loss of their annual revenue to fraud and abuses by employees.
Isn’t it time you stop hiring employees who help themselves to your bottom line? Pre-employment testing cuts the risk of hiring employees with counter-productive attitudes such lack of integrity, poor dependability, hostility, and even the possibility the employee will use illegal drugs or alcohol while at work or show up drunk, high or badly “hung over.”
Find out how Pre-Employment Tests can help screen high-risk candidates out before it’s too late