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Background Checks Can Help Prevent Thieving Employees

Manhattan Beach News

Accountant steals $200,000 from her own place of worship

By Julie Sharp


Over about three years, Traci Anderson embezzled around $200,000 from a Manhattan Beach church that was her place of worship and employer.

Anderson, 37, of Manhattan Beach, pleaded no contest in Torrance Superior Court June 9 to one embezzlement charge and a grand theft charge was dropped in exchange for her plea, according to the Daily Breeze. She was sentenced to two years in prison according to Deputy District Attorney Paul Guthrie for stealing from her employer, Church of the Beach Cities, and could have faced a maximum sentence of five years for the grand theft charge.

For the entire article The Beach Reporter

This is an old story but certainly new to you when it’s your worker you discover has just stolen your money.  Embezzlement is a big problem, which is one of the reasons you should always be running credit reports as part of your preemployment  background checks.  Quite often the employment candidate in financial trouble will cause you financial trouble.   As for the rest, they’ll get in trouble later, and that’s when the stealing starts.

These are some hard times out there, what with the economic downtown.   At Corra we are seeing a lot of financial frauds, scams and some “indiscretions,” to put it nicely, in the work place.  The article above is one instance where the employee thought the company money was her money.  She was confused and thought they were partners and not on an employer-employee relationship.

There are a lot of a reasons employees will steal from you.   And a lot of things they can steal.  Money is only one of them.  Competitors may pay well for your proprietary information or for your valuable databases.  As for the employee, they can have substance abuse and gambling troubles or just consumer habits that have given the term shop to you drop a whole new meaning.   The home equity situation could have left them hanging.  As I said there are reasons.  Reasons breed trouble.  You don’t need trouble.

So if you aren’t running background checks and have in place a thorough preemployment screening program, then you got to be crazy.  Times call for it.  Get smart.

Check them out before you hire.  Call Corra.

By Gordon Basichis

Gordon Basichis is the Co-Founder of Corra Group, specializing in pre-employment background checks and corporate research. He has been a marketing and media executive and has worked in the entertainment industry, the financial, health care and technology sectors. He is the author of the best selling Beautiful Bad Girl, The Vicki Morgan Story, a non-fiction novel that helped define exotic sexuality in the late twentieth century. He is the author of the Constant Travellers and has recently completed a new book, The Guys Who Spied for China, dealing with Chinese Espionage in the United States. He has been a journalist for several newspapers and is a screenwriter and producer.