Employee Crime Case Study

Businesses are vulnerable to a variety of internal and external crimes that affects an organization’s performance. White-collar crime is a problem that cost American companies millions of dollars every day and negatively impacts the global economy in billions annually. This paper will identify the types of employee crimes, focusing on theft and the perpetrators; examine the impact to businesses and explore how business can deal with these offenses.

Consider the following potential and common scenarios: Before leaving for the day, Robert puts some extra office supplies in his bag for his daughter to use on her upcoming school project. Gary takes an extra 10 minutes on his lunch break and is now checking his Facebook and twitter accounts

Appelbaum, 2006 suggests some theories of how individuals rationalize their crimes into different categories. The first, the equity theory, whereby they feel the company owes them based on their perception of an unequal relationship between work or the effort performed versus what value the organization recognizes. Second, the work climate dimension where company policies and attitudes convey an air of inevitability that employee crime will happen and making allowances for it is part of the cost of doing business. Lastly, having a low level of cognitive moral development, with those individuals only attaining pre-conventional or conventional moral values; where the new ‘Golden Rule’ is what’s in it for me (Appelbaum, 2006).

“Business Crime costs the U.S. economy at least $186 billion annually” (Kuratko, 2000). Just because a company is small, with few employees and under a few million in gross revenue annually does not mean they are immune from employee theft. In fact, most businesses in the U.S. are classified as small businesses employing more than half the workforce. “The Association for Certified Fraud Examiners indicates 39% of reported instances of fraud occur in companies with 99 or fewer employees (Bressler,