LAST MONTH'S QUESTION
In working with a client, you come to find out that they are stealing from their corporation. They say, "Just between us, I've been able to turn in $250 a month for the past year of receipts that I just made up. The dollar amount is so small that no one has caught on to what I've been doing." What do you do now?
Here are comments from Shary Raske, president of The Corporate Muse:
If someone said this to me, my response would be, "Just between you and me, I think by you telling me you're ready to stop this nonsense. First of all it's stealing, and secondly if you're doing something that you know is wrong, it's probably effecting how you feel about yourself. So you tell me how you are going to stop. You tell me how you are going to pay back your employer, then I'll tell you what I'm going to do."
Here are comments from Rick Miller, Account Executive at Consolidated Communications Directories:
[Miller, Rick] I was just recently presented with a scenario much
like the one in this month's question. The person who approached me wasn't so much mis-appropriating funds as they were enjoying the rewards of a flaw in our payroll process that was allowing them to receive more pay than they were entitled to receive for certain contracts. I am in the same position as the person who told me about the extra compensation they were receiving, so I checked some of my past commission statements and I even found a few of my contracts where I was paid too much. Now I will admit, I was tempted not to say anything. But about a nano-second later I remembered that we are part of a publicly held company. So I knew that I should probably say something because this flaw in our process was, in essence, knocking dollars off of our bottom line. But at the same time I didn't want to get the person who brought this to my attention disciplined. After all the only thing they were actually guilty of was being quiet about the whole thing. So I brought my commission statements into my department supervisor's office and discussed the problem with them. This has all been done recently so we are still waiting.
So I guess the way I would handle the problem presented in the
question would be to warn the person who had confided in me about the consequences of their actions, and to tell them to guard against doing it anymore. Then I would talk to the necessary people to try and make employees more accountable for their expense report receipts. I would not try to get the person who confided in me fired, I would leave that up to that person. But I would try to make sure that no one else was able to siphon money from the company in that way.
First, I think both of these responses are valid and well thought out. My own response would be to say, "By telling me this you have not at all insured that I won't share it with others. I keep things confidential that are ethical and legal, not criminal behavior." Then I would use Shary's line about, "Tell me how you are going to handle this situation." If I was working with this person as an Executive Coach, I would refund them their money for the time remaining in our coaching relationship and move on. These are not the kinds of people I want to be associated with.
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