• Government
• Profession
• Business
• Opinion
• Health

• Health reform
• H1N1
• P4P
• EMRs
• Medicare
• Liability
• AMA House
• » More

• Book Excerpt
• Business Pitch
• Meetings
• » More

• Contract Language
• Ethics Forum
• In the Courts
• Practice Management
• Technically Speaking
• » More

• Bby date
• Regions
• Health plans
• Sections
• News briefs
• Columns
• Editorials
• Letters
• Writers
• Other years

• Search tips
• E-mail alert
• Radio
• RSS
• Mobile
• Subscribe
• Institutions
• Staff directory
• Advertising
• Permissions
• Reprints
• News media
• Site guide
• Useful links
• About
• Premium
• Contact

Catch them if you can: Don't let staff steal from your practice

Employees can't rob you blind if your eyes are open to the possibility of theft. Here's how to ensure that no one on your staff has sticky fingers, while also not alienating the innocent.

By Robert Kazel, amednews staff. Nov. 24, 2003.

• PRINT|
• E-MAIL|
• RESPOND|
• REPRINTS|
• SHARE

To be able to trust your employees is priceless. To never be on the defensive against rare cases of dishonesty can be costly.

Blindly trusting workers who handle money or who carry out any financial-related task can trigger loss that may go undetected for many years. Cal Klausner, a CPA in Bethesda, Md., recalls a bookkeeper of a two-doctor ob-gyn clinic who embezzled money from the office in a scheme painfully simple in its execution.

Every month, the longtime worker would take the practice's American Express bill and show it to one doctor, who would sign a check for payment. The bookkeeper would go to the second doctor with the same bill, get another check signed, and would use that check to pay her personal credit card bill. The card issuer was not suspicious that a worker's personal bills were being paid on a medical office's checks. The scam went on for years and cost the practice about $25,000.

"Each doctor wasn't aware of what the other one was doing," Klausner says.

Such instances of deceit and betrayal are not only hazardous to any practice's financial health. They can be deeply hurtful to doctors' sense of trust and to a practice's team spirit once they are exposed.

"She used to baby-sit [the doctors'] kids," Klausner says. "She was considered a member of the family." The long-running fraud ultimately was discovered while the employee was on vacation.

She didn't go to jail because the doctors decided not to pursue prosecution, which is common in such cases, Klausner says. Practices are often eager to put the past behind them when they find they have been duped, lacking the "resources or inclination" to try to regain the money or punish an errant employee, he says. Yet emotional scars can remain long after the employee is fired.