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Crime Stats IT

Workplace Theft Is On the Rise (theatlantic.com) 328

Posted by EditorDavid from the never-buying-pens dept.
rfengineer tipped us off to this story. The Atlantic reports: Your office is a den of thieves. Don't take my word for it: When a forensic-accounting firm surveyed workers in 2013, 52 percent admitted to stealing company property. And the thievery is getting worse. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners reports that theft of "non-cash" property -- ranging from a single pencil in the supply closet to a pallet of them on the company loading dock -- jumped from 10.6 percent of corporate-theft losses in 2002 to 21 percent in 2018. Managers routinely order up to 20 percent more product than is necessary, just to account for sticky-fingered employees.

Some items -- scissors, notebooks, staplers -- are pilfered perennially; others vanish on a seasonal basis: The burn rate on tape spikes when holiday gifts need wrapping, and parents ransack the supply closet in August, to avoid the back-to-school rush at Target. After a new Apple gadget is released, some workers report that their company-issued iPhone is broken -- knowing that IT will furnish a replacement, no questions asked. What's behind this 9-to-5 crime wave? Mark R. Doyle, the president of the loss-prevention consultancy Jack L. Hayes International, points to a decrease in supervision, the ease of reselling purloined products online, and what he alleges is "a general decline in employee honesty."
The report advises companies that the best way to reduce fraud was with surprise audits and data monitoring.

Another interesting statistic? "Fraudsters" who'd been with their company for more than five years "stole twice as much."
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Workplace Theft Is On the Rise More

Workplace Theft Is On the Rise

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  • An idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02, 2019 @04:41PM (#58205030)

    Have they tried not treating their workers like shit? Won't stop all theft, but should reduce it.

    • Re:An idea (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @06:22PM (#58205478) Homepage Journal

      There's been a shift. When I was young, people normally stayed at jobs for ten or more years; it wasn't unusual for people to get out of school, get a job, and work at the same place until retirement. Relationships lasted beyond retirement with people taking company pensions (now largely raided to prop up executive compensation).

      The thing is, that's not *agile*. Companies hire and let go workers as needed; there's no sense that there's loyalty owed either way. The people working for you are like strangers you give the keys to your house to. The median duration of employment for someone 25-34 is about three years.

      • Re:An idea (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @09:28PM (#58206096)

        You read it here, workers who are at an employer more than 5 years steal twice as much! Gotta fire em quick.

        I worked in a place once that provided free soda to employees. For a while it worked, then we crossed a threshold of about 70 employees and stupid shit started happening. People walking out with costco containers of soda, etc. We knew who it was and we did give them grief, but some people are immune to peer pressure, and the boss doesn't fire based on hearsay. So they put in a vending machine (I don't know where it came from), and charged $.01 per soda. You could still "buy" 36 packs of soda for far less than they cost at Costco, but nobody did. The transaction process was enough, and pennies were always around as a result, so it was no big deal and we could still have nice things.

        The problem is that vending machines are designed for soda, but office supplies tax even the most flexible machine. There are software and tools that can provide a functional equivalent, but they usually cost more than the problem is worth. And thus this story isn't really that interesting: a decision was made, and the problem wasn't worth a solution.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

          Or you could put up a camera where the soda is and record anyone stealing. Just need to fire one of them before the rest gets the idea.

      • Eh, this whole story is bullshit anyway. "The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners reports that...." So an organization which gets paid to find problems reports that said problems are increasing. Wow. Who would have seen THAT coming?

    • It's funny how they don't talk about the declines in wages as being a cause of this.

      Asking a "loss prevention" consultant for their opinion? That's like asking Ebeneezer Scrooge why Bob Cratchit's family is going hungry.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dcw3 ( 649211 )

        Yeah, and I suppose this makes it okay to be a thief. WTF is this generation coming to?

        • Re:An idea (Score:5, Interesting)

          by LostMyAccount ( 5587552 ) on Sunday March 03, 2019 @12:08AM (#58206516)

          First of all Junior, I'm 52, so I don't know what the fuck generation you're talking about.

          I also challenge the entire narrative of "more theft" taking place. Random small quantities of office supplies have walked away for decades, mostly inadvertently. I mean what are you going to do, steal a box of copier paper and sell it on the corner?

          I also don't believe people can just smash their iPhones on purpose and get new models. The last group of people any IT department wants to reward is the moron that conveniently breaks their device. An exec might get away with it, but that shit's expensive and it would call attention to whoever did it more than once. They'd get canned or be required to keep it in a giant Otterbox type case.

          Whatever meaningful theft might be happening probably is an externality of 21st century capitalism. They shitcanned all the middle managers whose job it was, basically, to keep track of stuff. Just-in-time delivery means there's little planning and with the emphasis on rush shipping on everything, I'm sure the losses through outright mistakes in order fulfillment, delivery, etc are fairly high.

          I think is two things, one, a chance for employers to bitch about employees depriving them of their right and true profits through waste and thievery. And two, a way for employers to shift the burden of bad management onto their employees. Fuck them. If they weren't so greedy and self-dealing, they could keep track of their resources better.

          • I also don't believe people can just smash their iPhones on purpose and get new models.

            And yet you'd be amazed at how often I've seen this, and those people do take a bit of care when doing it, i.e. it's oh too convienent when it happens every time a new iPhone comes out. But every second time, and random months after release? What's IT gonna do? You need the device for your work, there's legitimate ways it could have broken. You want to get in a he-said she-said argument while no work gets done?

            This does happen and we oh so laughed at someone I know who did it when he was given the same old

            • I completely agree that too often management makes people use obsolete hardware needlessly.

              I work for an IT consulting firm, maybe 50-some employees and they make people use some of the most ridiculously old laptops. I mean, we're an IT consulting firm, what does it look like when I show up with a shit-ass old computer? "Hi, please spend money on technology, we don't."

              A lot of companies I work with literally have no end user computing life cycle plan. They push all the equipment way past it's useful life

    • Yeah, I'd imagine that I too would "steal" company supplies to wrap my Christmas gifts at work if I was forced to work crazy overtime in December. Somehow it's not considered wage theft when you're on salary, so don't be suprised if you have to go through hell to help meet some arbitrary ''End of Q4" deadline from your manager.

  • fill out 5 forums just to get a pen?

  • Probably more to do with the worsening economy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @04:45PM (#58205046)
    It's not worth getting in trouble for snagging office supplies most of the time, but if you're struggling to make ends meet and your school just sent home a giant list of crap you need for your kid then suddenly it's worth it.

    I remember being pretty shocked when even in high school I had to come up with $50-$100 bucks a month in various supplies for my kid's school projects. Crap that, when I was a kid (before the funding cuts of the mid 90s and 2000s) was just part of school.

    A buddy of mine recently moved from a poor district to a rich one after saving the down payment to buy a house and was shocked by how much he was saving on school supplies because the school had things like paper, pencils and art supplies.

    • Re: Probably more to do with the worsening economy (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The economy isn't "worsening" nor would that be an excuse to steal.

      • Re: Probably more to do with the worsening economy (Score:5, Funny)

        by Mr D from 63 ( 3395377 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @05:37PM (#58205282)

        The economy isn't "worsening" nor would that be an excuse to steal.

        With low unemployment, there are more thieves working today than ever!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          Disposable workers == disposable employers == disposable customers. Workers are thieving at every opportunity, stuff they do not even need, they just had that opportunity because the know, they full well know the company does not give one crap about them and as such they don't give one crap about the company or it's customers. Why the fuck not, compared to what the executives steal at the top, the works down the bottom are stealing nothing, no matter how much they steal.

          Company makes records profits, not e

    • but if you're struggling to make ends meet and your school just sent home a giant list of crap you need for your kid then suddenly it's worth it.

      You don't actually have to send all those supplies to school.

      Schools send out ridiculous lists because they work on the Robin Hood principle: Only a subset of parents actually send supplies, and the teachers redistribute from that stash to everyone else who have "hardships".

      One year we were told to send twelve dozen sharpened pencils for each student. Taken literally, that would imply that each kid was using up a whole pencil almost every day. We usually just rounded those requests down to a reasonable amou

      • Re:Probably more to do with the worsening economy (Score:5, Insightful)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @08:46PM (#58205974) Homepage Journal

        One year we were told to send twelve dozen sharpened pencils for each student.

        Who wants to bet someone wrote down 12 (dozen) pencils, and someone dropped the parentheses?

        • I'm sure that it was 144 pencils. They used to specify N boxes of pencils, they actually most likely phrased it as "Six boxes of 24-pencils each, sharpened". For other years, it was usually a slightly smaller, but still ridiculous, number, like four boxes.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dcw3 ( 649211 )

        Only a subset of parents actually send supplies, and the teachers redistribute from that stash to everyone else who have "hardships".

        Maybe that's how it works in your district. It wasn't the case where we live (Fairfax Co., VA), which has one of the best funded systems around. You learn not to balk at the list if you don't want your kids grades to suffer. They teach political bribery early in the DC suburbs.

    • Re:Probably more to do with the worsening economy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @05:12PM (#58205182) Journal
      I am not a company owner, but if I were I would not care one bit if employees were taking pens home. I wouldn't even call that stealing. Take them if they want. I would put a basket in the front labeled, "Free Pens." Because seriously, if pens make people happy......such a small expense for improving office morale. And why not, a free red stapler at every desk.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Problem is someone will open an eBay store selling pens.

      • Re:Probably more to do with the worsening economy (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @06:43PM (#58205558)
        Pens are probably not the best example. When I was working at a hotel, we accidentally ordered a 200-pack of the expensive high-end luxurious soft bath towels instead of the standard grade ones. The customers really liked them (we got numerous unsolicited comments about how nice they were), so we were mulling the possibility of switching to them permanently. The housekeeping staff didn't report any problems with them wearing out in the wash faster than the regular towels (industrial washing machines are not kind on textiles). Normally 200 towels would last about 1-2 years before they'd wear out and we'd have to order new ones. But the luxury ones lasted less than 6 months before we were down to a couple dozen.

        There was no proof, but the obvious suspicion was that employees were simply taking them home (they were really nice) and either giving them out to friends and relatives or selling them. Overall they represented the loss of about $1500 (luxury towel cost minus 6 months of regular towel cost), and we decided not to switch because of the rampant theft. Since the hotel only had about 70 employees and the end-of-year bonus pool was a percent of the profit, basically each employee chipped in $20 of their annual bonus to buy towels for a few thieves.
    • Reading the article, there is no evidence theft is on the rise. Its always been pretty common. I remember the supply room at a plant construction site was called 'the freebee room" where folks helped themselves to work gloves, marker, duct tape, safety glasses, etc. Some of that ended up at flea markets I believe.

      I take paper and pads and stuff like that home because I work at home many days. I use my own power, printer ink, internet connection, etc. So there is a very fair trade off if I happen to use s

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by epine ( 68316 )

        So I'm thinking hard about a work problem on the morning commute for half an hour (which I never bill), and I'm supposed to worry about saving myself a trip to Office Depot to replenish a few pads of note paper, by stuffing my rucksack with a couple of pads from office supplies?

        True, my employer has good reason to be pissed off: I might have invested 15 unbilled minutes into resolving a work problem in the car on the drive across town.

        Compared to a pen, the loss of 15 unbilled minutes they might have otherw

      • It sorta is, but it scales with operation.
        So in construction you have a lot of disposeable items that can be single use, for safety. Nitril and work gloves are good examples, because a small team can quickly spend 100-200 gloves per month if the work demands it. It quickly turns into the same economic scale as pencils: Extremely disposable.
        Copy paper is also on the same scale, because even a small 4-5 man team can effortlessy use 2000-3000 pages a month at a small operation. At a larger operation it becomes

    • Re:Probably more to do with the worsening economy (Score:4, Insightful)

      by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @05:39PM (#58205294)

      Actually it's the other way around. All stats show that the more you make the more you steal. It correlates also with how long you've been at the company and thus can "get away with".

      So a better economy would translate in higher theft since "the company is doing better now, they can afford some losses".

      In the end it's just part of doing business, would you fire your best for taking a pen or a $5 box of pens? Electronics similarly are both insured and replaced through leases at virtually no cost. I've never had electronics disappear through third party theft, but the insurance doesn't go down so an employee needing a replacement at the end of the useful lifespan is better for me in the end.

      • Honestly, if HR came to me and said one of my employee took a pen home and I needed to deal with it Iâ(TM)d probably think it was a joke. The issue is not people taking the odd pen home which theyâ(TM)ll probably use to work on firm stuff anyways, its people taking supplies wholesale. I had to deal with a few such odd case where grown ass adult making 70-80k a year were stealing boxes of rechargeable batteries ( gaming industry, remote batteries ). Weâ(TM)re not in the valley where that woul
  • Treat workers like crap, and you'll get treated like crap in return. A lot of US employers: (1) Don't want to give time off, even if it's written into the contract. No vacation time and discouraged sick leave are a fucking disgrace. (2) Lobby against things like public insurance, because they want workers tied to their jobs for life, (3) Treat employees like children -- drug-test and thus penalize recreational activity outside the office. (4) Fire employees before their vested to keep them from vestin

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bonker ( 243350 )

      Companies in the U.S. are vastly less honorable and loyal to their employees than they've been in a long time, and they're getting worse every year.

      Loyalty and respect are a two-way streets. If you treat employees like mindless tools, they're going to treat the company like a tool-- in this case, 'getting fair compensation' by hook or crook. They know that a board-room full of executives are still going to be super-wealthy at the end of the day, even if they five-finger every piece of kit they can lay their

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dcw3 ( 649211 )

      More likely, you're treated like a child because you're acting like one. Not to mention being a thief who thinks they hold the moral highground...SMH.

  • There's a book about this. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DanielRavenNest ( 107550 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @04:56PM (#58205100)

    I seem to remember a Dilbert book "How to build a better life by stealing office supplies".

    The summary didn't mention "envy" as a reason. The disparity in pay and wealth has grown a lot in the last few decades. Contrast Jeff Bezos with an Amazon warehouse worker, or the Walton family vs Walmart clerks. CEOs have always made more than line staff, but the ratio has increased greatly.

  • ...pay them a living wage & stop stealing their labour/wages. Wage theft is in an order of magnitude a bigger problem & generates a lot of ill-will between employers & employees: https://www.datamaticsinc.com/... [datamaticsinc.com]

    How about an agreement: We won't steal a few $s worth of stationery from you if you don't steal $1000s in wages you owe us? No? Didn't think so.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dcw3 ( 649211 )

      In this economy, if you're not making enough at one employer, why the fuck are you staying there? No, let's lower ourselves to theft and stick it to the man, right? moron.

  • Wages of Wage Stagnation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by imperious_rex ( 845595 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @05:22PM (#58205226)
    I'm not condoning employee theft, but I understand where they're coming from. With stagnant wages [pewresearch.org], it should be no surprise to anybody that more employees are committing petty larceny. But the bigger cost is "time theft" when non-smoking workers take smoke breaks too, long visits to the bathroom with a smart phone in the pocket, or the frequent extended lunch break. Employees with stagnant wages will seek just compensation one way or another.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Compensation is the critical operative term here. Employees are already treated as thieves and sometimes punished accordingly even if they've actually done nothing yet. Even in Canada where it's flatly illegal to deduct from wages many employers in smaller businesses will try their luck, committing what amounts to extortion or outright theft for things like "client canceled their order" and other things considered EBIT.

      Loyalty is a two way street: When you spend months or years being treated like dirt, and

    • still mange to take breaks they're not supposed to. Everybody does. Humans aren't good at working continuously for long hours without rest. Some can, and we have a bad habit of treating those people as the norm and calling out anyone who can't do that as lazy thieves... kinda like you just did.
    • It's really bullshit to call it time theft when an employee takes the same break another can use to go use drugs on the job. (Yes it's legal but it is a drug, and more harmful than most illegal ones. Plus employers are still firing for pot where legal.)

      • "Time theft" may be a bullshit term, but it's not my term. It's Wal-Mart's. An excerpt from Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America by Barbara Enrenreich:

        "No "grazing" that is, eating from food packages that somehow become open; no "time theft." This last sends me drifting off in a sci-fi direction: And as the time thieves headed back to the year 3420, loaded with weekends and days off looted from the twenty-first century... Finally a question. The old guy who is being hired as a people greeter wan

  • Office supplies are no longer critical (Score:3)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @05:27PM (#58205236) Journal

    If you go back in time 50 years, office supplies of the sort discussed in the article were paramount. There was no other way to run a business without the physical supplies required to function. So the inventory and management of those items was critical, because the volume of those items used was so high that it directly effected the profit to unsure their efficient use (we processed 5000 accounts this month, we should have consumed X amount of resources A, B and C). Now that it is possible and desirable to go "paper free", the management of physical office supplies has fallen to the wayside. Businesses recognize that these things must be needed for some tasks, and so they provide them. However since they do not drive the bottom line, and the volume consumed is an order of magnitude less, they are not managed as closely. So now it is easier than ever to take things even though the volume of those items consumed by a business is far less.

  • During an office 'cubicle densification' -- another form of workplace fraud, where companies steal square footage from their workers :-P -- in the absence of guidance, many people boxed up the stuff they wanted to keep and dumped out their office drawers into boxes, which probably went back out onto one of those pallets and likely straight into the trash.

    I expect this problem to go away within our lifetimes, anyway, with continuous progress towards ubiquitous electronic documents and data interchange in a

  • If your job includes doing work at home (either officially or unofficially), perhaps you need supplies at home to do so. Now I would hope that taking such needed supplies home would be approved by the company - and I am fortunate enough to work for a company that feels this way - I can take home pretty much anything I need to for my job, but for companies that don't, perhaps asking people to extend their work lives into their home lives is a driver for physical parts of the office "migrating" to the home "o

  • Just deduct it from the dividend (Score:4, Funny)

    by grumling ( 94709 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @06:01PM (#58205402) Homepage

    But they told me to act like I own the company.

  • Another interesting statistic? "Fraudsters" who'd been with their company for more than five years "stole twice as much."

    If you nick a pencil a day and a notepad per week then you will tend to get more the longer you're there. This is like, maths and stuff.

    Also, the ones who are really shit at getting away with it tend to get caught & fired, thereby removing themselves from the pool. They should invent a name for that - survivorship bias, or something.

  • If you want to be taken seriously... (Score:3)

    by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Saturday March 02, 2019 @07:03PM (#58205638)

    Stop lumping the guy who went home with a pen (literally anyone) alongside the chick stealing boxes of pens and selling them online.

    There is a very big difference between the person who just doesn't sweat their location when they print something and the person who deliberately prints and binds copies of books from project guttenberg to resell.

  • People have to get their raises somehow.

  • It isn’t theft, it is a perk.

  • Not sure if thief is on the rise or just more security in the workplace :-)

    just a side note, Years ago when I worked at walmart, more employees got fired for stealing than shoplifters caught.

  • I managed 4 storerooms for a large city. We stocked really nice pigskin leather gloves, batteries, hand tools and brass water meters and parts. I told my employees to charge items to our department if they wanted batteries for a radio, gloves or other items. I know they still stole stuff.. The safety officer told me she would prefer people used safety gear at home so they wouldn't get injured and miss time at work. The water meters were a real theft problem. Old or obsolete ones were supposed to be returned
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • one Tory Minister, Chris Grayling, just awarded a contract to run a ferry service to a company that has no ferries, for about 6.5 million pound. It then turned out that what he did was illegal, because he hadn't gone through normal procurement procedures, and paid 33 million pount in damages to a real ferry company. That's about 40 million out of utter stupidity. However, that is nothing compared to about £2.5 BILLION damages he caused earlier.

    So WTF are you talking here about some pencils? (

  • I work for a Fortune 500 company and here's what you'll find in the office supplies cabinet: pads of 8x11 lined paper, a box of cheap stick pens, paper clips and fold back clips. That's it. If you want post-it notes or highlighters, a stapler or tape, that requires a manager's approval. And very little printer paper is kept next to the multifunction printer/scanner/copier, which you have to log into to use so you know you're being monitored. Not much worth stealing here.

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