Hello, my name is Gary Shotton, and I own this machine shop called Auto Turn manufacturing. And I’m going to take my safety glasses off just so I can see you just a little better through these this video. I’m going to talk today about “Embezzlement”.   Embezzlement, let me give a desk definition. When someone, in a secret way, inside your company, should choose to steal from you normally stealing money, normally stealing cash, they have embezzled from you. They’ve taken something that they don’t own and put it in their pocket. So I’m going to tell a couple stories, real stories, stories in first hand experience. First of all, about 25-30 years ago. I was the owner of a trucking company and in that trucking company I had a second in command. A man named Randy. I would never say his last name. Randy appeared to be loyal, appeared to be committed to me, but unbeknownst to me in the middle of a week, he captured and took away about seven blank checks, and he proceeded to type out these checks and he made these checks out to him so that he could go to the bank and cash the checks and put the money in his pocket, and that was a pure distinct embezzlement. Oh, he covered his trail by falsifying some invoices. He is pretty smart, and I had very little recourse, but at the end of the weekend on Monday morning, I discovered fifteen thousand dollars of my money, not in my account, but was in his pocket. Man that hurt. It was my second in command. It was somebody that I thought I could trust, and even worse than that, he took and used that money against me and his wife left, and she was a key employee also at the same time. I’m not justifying it. He justified it because he had a lot of pressure on him, and he needed the cash. Well, that was my money. Let me tell you about David. David had a contracting company. He was doing hard work. He had workers out on the field. He has taken care of details in the field, But on a regular basis he’s seen be coming up short of cash. He couldn’t see where all his money was going, and after a while he hired someone to take a look, and they balanced the checkbook and they found out this worker, this individual, the key accountant inside their business was again taking checks, writing those checks to themselves and just not recording it. They put that money in their pocket. It turns out, to the best of my knowledge, this person had a gambling habit. They weren’t even using the money for good reason. They were going down and wagering it at the a gambling establishment. Hoping to win more money. They took almost two hundred thousand dollars to the best of my knowledge. Let’s talk about Bill. He was in a similar situation. He had someone taking care of his payroll. The payroll is where you pay your employees, but in our country, I know this could be different around the world, you have to take a certain amount of funds, and you must forward that on to the federal government in the form of income tax, a tax deduction. That’s not your money, it has to be set aside for each individual. Once again, this individual seemed to have a gambling habit and they put that money in their pocket, went away, and basically as far as I’m concerned, the same as took a match and burn it up. But again, my friend Bill lost upwards of $250,000 before they figured it out. I felt bad with my 15. These other people felt really bad with their sums, and what’s this kind of embarrassment is that it’s hard to prosecute these people. You have given these people that work for you some kind of authority, and they’ve taken advantage of the authority. I’d like to hope that each one of you will never have that happen, but I kind of suspect that if you’re in business long enough, you’ll probably have someone embezzle from you. So small you maybe never know about it. It may be happening now. Let me share a few tips that I think could help you keep from having this happening. Number one, require receipts for everything. We’re a receipt based company. If we spend money, we have a receipt, that means a document that shows exactly where every penny of that money went, a check matches a receipt. Don’t give people authority to sign in your behalf. I would never create a stamp. Some people talk about a stamp that has my signature, so they could just stamp my signature on certain documents, so that it looked like I signed those documents. I would never do that, and I give very, very limited authority. Only one person besides my wife has any authority to write checks on behalf of our company. Investigate the people that you’re working with. You know it’s okay in the investigation process in my opinion to ask about the financial standings of those that are handling your cash. You know if you discover that they’re always late on paying their bills that they don’t have good financial responsibility in their own personal affairs, that they’re not a good person to handle your financial affairs. If you hear about them doing something like gambling or being down at the casino being someplace where money is loosely distributed, boy, I would be very– call that a red flag. I would investigate deeper. I think you have the right to ask them for their credit history. In the U.S., we have that. I know in other countries you may not have that, but if you don’t have a credit report, you can ask people around town, “Hey, is this person good at paying your bills?” Because, if they’re not good at paying their bills, they’re not going to be good at paying your bills and the temptations there. Keep in mind that 99.9% of all people I work with, are totally honest in my opinion. They would not steal from me, but it just takes one in a hundred that steals from you, and you’ll have a lesson learned. Lock your checks up. Never have loose checks. Never have checks out where somebody could get ahold of them. These are blank checks. I know in some countries, you may not write checks. You may have a cash society. So, you’ll have to lock up the cash. Have a limited number of people have access to your cash, checks, and then never keep extra checks at your place of business, like a full box of checks. That’s what happened on my personal case. This person that worked for me had access to the file cabinet and knew that we had a huge stack of blank checks, and so they were able to go down deep into the stack and pull out some checks and take them, and you’d negotiate those checks. We now keep all of our extra checks off premise in our case, it’s at our house. When we need more checks, we bring a limited number, just a few checks to the office, and that way they’re not out there of being at temptation. Balance your checkbook. You would be surprised how many people do not balance their checkbook. What do I mean by that? When you have a bank statement that comes at the end of the month, you make sure that every single check is accounted for it. There’s no questioning who wrote this check, and what it went for, and never allow cash transactions to go on without having a written document. In other words, if somebody was to pay you in cash, like at a cash register, there should be a ticket that spit out, that comes out, that there’s a registering of that cash that went into your possession, into your company’s possession. If somebody is going to pay you– I have some rent homes, and so when somebody pays me cash, I never ever, ever received that cash without having a receipt book. I do it in carbon. That way, I give the person that paid me a cash receipt, where I’ve signed it, and they’ve signed it, and I keep a copy of that in cash as a receipt that I have it, and I know, and I can trace cash. I hope these videos are beneficial to you. I hope you never are embezzled. I hope that we can help you Inspire Better Business. Let me tell you how you can help me. One simple way, share this video. Would you consider telling someone about this website, telling someone through an email forwarding of this link, tell somebody through Facebook or something similar to that, that we are here to help start, grow, and excel in business, and we’re here to help you? No charge, I don’t get paid to do this, none of my speakers get paid to do this. They want to help you in any culture, in any part of the world, in any language. Thank you.