I know I have blogged about this before, but with the relentless economic downtrend and the psychological damage and sens of insecurity in may have created, employee theft is on the rise. My one recent blog, Background Checks to Help Prevent Employee Theft, covered some of this issue. But since then I learned a few things that should cause employers to take not.
There is a marked increase in the theft of confidential corporate information. Proprietary data is also coveted, especially with respect to research and development projects. The reason–these are highly competitive times and in a bad economy your competition believes that it needs every edge it can manage. Some of your competition won’t allow little things like ethics and criminality get in the way of their objectives. In short, they will steal from you. They will bribe or otherwise cajole your current and former staff to do the stealing for them.
More than 75 percent of the corporate theft is committed by insiders. this should not be all that surprising. What is surprising to some extent revelatory is that somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of the theft is conducted by middle managers. Outside staff account for about twenty percent of the theft, and department heads can be responsible for about ten percent of the theft. Team members are culpable about 15 to 20 percent of the time.
Most of the leakage, not surprisingly comes from email, and about a quarter of the time it can be attributed to thumb or flash drives. A smaller percentage is printed out, and then there are the miscellaneous means, FTP, etc. In all, one could say confidential data is leaking out of the employer’s system every which way, with everyone from managers and outsiders participating in the theft. The information is also gathered in numerous ways, making it difficult to plug all the gaps.
I would like to say background checks are the solution. True, they go a long way in vetting out the possible thieves and undesirables, but I would be lying if I claimed they were the sole answer. Background checks are but part of a greater defense system. Greater vigilance, better security, video cameras and stringent password accessibility are helpful in defending your business from data theft.
While most employees are honest, the lousy economy and financial and job stress has caused some employees to commit to desperate acts. Ruinous acts that when caught can end their careers but in the process cause employers a great deal of damage.
Surely, conduct background checks. But bring in security experts to assess your situation and determine how vulnerable you are. Spend the time and money that will allow them to plug the holes. The initial cost of establishing meaningful security is far greater than losing your confidential to competitors and whomever else may be wishing you harm.
