Managing your employees properly to prevent fraud

While you may work hard to hire the best employees out there, some employees have a nasty habit known as committing fraud against their employers. Fraud actually accounts for up to 7% of lost income for business. Fraud is more than taking a pen or a notepad; it often includes giving away free products to friends and stealing money from the company. Preventing fraud is one of the most important things an employer can do in order to prevent losing money and weeding out the bad employees. Here are some simple tips to follow that will help you manage your employees properly to prevent fraud:

Tip # 1 - Check-up
One of the most important things you can do to prevent fraud is to check-up on your employees work. If you don't want to personally check-up on each person, you can always have your employees check-up on each other. When you only have one person over something important like your bank accounts, the temptation to start stealing money from those accounts is pretty easy. When you train employees to assume multiple roles, it helps to keep other employees accountable so they don't try to steal from your business.

Tip # 2 - Honesty
A great way to prevent fraud is to make sure your employees see hat you are an honest person. Showing your employees that you are a trustworthy person will help them learn that they should not be dishonest in their dealings with the company.

Tip # 3 - Investigate behavior
If you suspect one of your employees of fraud, investigate them. Each time you notice any type of suspicious behavior with any employee, you should always do a quiet investigation or you should hire an external investigator to come in and check-up on the employee. Having routine investigations done on your employees will help them stay honest and they will know they cannot get away with fraud because they will be caught.

Tip # 4 - Manage fairly
As a manager, you have a large responsibility to your employees. The way you manage them will determine how they will act as employees. If you aren't being fair or you are favoring employees, it can be easy for people to become disgruntled and fraudulent. Some things you can do to show fairness include providing your employees with good benefits, adequate compensation, recognition of hard work, and a team-building environment will all help employees avoid committing fraud. People want to work for a company and a manager that recognizes their hard work and wants them to be successful. Providing them with feedback about their job performance will help them learn how to become better employees and it will go a long way in your desire to be a fair manager.

Tip # 5 - Proper screening
One of the easiest ways to prevent fraud is to make sure you have a thorough screening process for each applicant before you hire them. If they have left other companies, find out why they left, did they get fired for fraud? You want to do a thorough investigation of the person so you know who you are really hiring before you just offer them the position.

Not only is it important for companies to pay attention to their employees, they also need to pay attention to their contractors and suppliers. If you aren't checking your inventory often, you could be losing thousands of dollars a year because the suppliers are shorting you. Always look over every shipment before you sign the checklist so you know that you are truly getting your money's worth. Unfortunately dishonesty does exist and employers cannot be to careful when they are dealing with outsiders.