Prevent Fraud By Maintaining a Safe Workplace Stats and Facts

FACTS

  1. Employees have admitted to stealing at least once from their employer. 
  2. Whether it’s a result of entitlement or just general dishonesty, employee theft comes in many forms and at varying degrees.
  3. Everything from scrolling social media during a meeting to sharing confidential documents with an outside source can be considered workplace theft. 
  4. If you’re leading a company, it’s important to stay up to date on what’s what (legally). Internal theft can have a major impact on your bottom line.
  5. In most cases, you can spot employee fraudsters through behavioral red flags such as living beyond their means, excessive control issues, or irritability.
  6. The best departments to start fraud investigations include operations, accounting, upper management, and sales as these are the top departments where occupational fraud cases have been discovered.

STATS

  • More than three-fourths of all occupational fraud cases came from these high-risk departments: Operations (15%), Accounting (14%), Executive/Upper Management (12%), Sales (11%), and Customer Service (9%) (ACFE, 2020).
  • 75% of employees admitted to stealing from their employers at least once and 37.5% of employees have stolen at least twice (Static Brain, n.d.).
  • 64% of employees steal from small businesses, showing how small businesses are very susceptible to employee theft (Complete Controller, 2019).
  • 79% of embezzlement cases involved more than one employee. The average number of employees involved is three (CUTimes, 2019).

Profile of Perpetrators 

  • 33% of embezzlers worked in the accounting or finance department (CUTimes, 2019).
  • 85% of embezzlement cases were perpetrated by an employee at the managerial level or above (CUTimes, 2019).
  • 41% of occupational fraud cases were perpetrated by employee-level staff, 35% were done by manager-level personnel, and 20% were committed by owners/executives (ACFE, 2020).
  • 64% of occupational fraudsters had a university degree or higher (ACFE, 2020).
  • Males committed more occupational fraud (72%) than females