Employee theft has been on the increase for some time now. Since the Recession, especially, the increase is quite substantial. It is not just staplers and pencils anymore. Employees are setting up dummy vendor accounts in computer data banks and writing themselves checks for services never rendered. There are increased stores about corporate espionage, insider jobs, and theft of proprietary information.
Here is another story where a former employer from Microsoft has been accused of stealing trade secrets.
According to the Bloomberg Article…”A former Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) employee was charged with stealing the software maker’s trade secrets, including code for a program to protect against copyright infringement, and leaking them to a blogger in France.
“The Center for Responsible Enterprise & Trade, a Washington-based advocacy organization headed by former Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Pamela Passman, in February released a study on the economic effects of trade-secret theft. The study identified “malicious insiders” as one of five categories of potential misappropriators of trade secrets. The others were nation states, competitors, transnational organized crime and what the report’s authors called “hactavists.”
“Microsoft was alerted to the theft in 2012 by an individual, who asked that his… Read More”
Always wise to conduct background checks for pre-employment screening but also for current employees. Sometimes you can discover before they damage you if they have any legal or financial troubles or have incidents of substance abuse.
