Employee theft can take many forms, including embezzling money, directly taking products and stealing information. Understanding the different types of employee theft is important because there are many important distinctions, both when it comes to the impact it has on the business and criminal charges.
Here is a list of the most common things employees steal.
1. Physical cash
Employees often have access to company cash. An employee might take money from cash registers, petty cash drawers or open safes. Additionally, employees might make a customer pay more for an item and keep the difference paid.
2. Company supplies or equipment
Sometimes an employee might take small items from an office or stockroom, including pens, scissors or stapes. This might happen over the course of employment or on the day the employee quits. In other cases, a worker could take more expensive objects, such as furniture or computers.
3. Merchandise
When employees are in warehouses or on sales floors, they might steal physical products. For example, workers might hide items in their apron pockets or behind other merchandise on shelves to steal later. In a stockroom, an employee could take products before they are scanned into the store inventory software.
4. Information
According to Inc.com, an increasingly common form of employee theft is an attack on company computer systems. Employees might steal information from their employers, such as office memoranda, customer lists or proprietary data. This theft can take place via printing, emailing or carrying out a physical object. Employees could also steal customer information such as credit cards and other personal data.
5. Payroll
Employees can perform actions or falsify records to get paid for work they did not complete. For example, they might request travel reimbursement for a trip unrelated to employment or submit time sheets with shifts they did not work. On a smaller scale, employees could take a lot of breaks and fail to deduct the time from their hours.