Hi Ladies,
I'm a single Mom, Internist, in a solo private practice office that is administratively part of a group practice "without walls".
Just wanted to remind you to be on the lookout for the Office Embezzler. I just caught my Office Manager who had been my employee for 8 years and was LITERALLY my right arm. She'd only been manager for the past 2 1/2 years, having come up through the ranks. She was SO helpful and good with patients and good with taking care of all the paperwork on a daily basis that keeps us out of trouble with this government requirement and that one, that I trusted her implicitly. I felt she was extremely loyal, my longest and "best" employee, my business confidant and collaborator, and paid her well. The Centralized Billing part of our group caught her siphoning off cash, about $20,000 over the past two years. When we got the police involved, it turned out she had a record!--two felonies for
grand larceny and grand theft from prior to the time I hired her. In 1994 I wasn't doing background checks and she came to me as a student Medical Assistant Extern sent by the local college. (We've been doing background checks for the past couple of years but had "grandmothered" in all the longtime employees. . .).
Her scheme: she knew the TOTAL deposit for patient care monies had to match the TOTAL amount of money posted on the computer. It took a long time to catch her because her TOTALS always matched. Her line by line items did not match however. She would post $200 in money received from patients, then only deposit $20 for example and wait until I got checks in for other things and then add them into the deposit as if they were from patient care. These "other non-patient care things were medical records charges or honoraria for attending drug-rep conferences or participating in medical or market research or the check from the Home Health Care I was medical director of, or the check from the Weight Loss Clinic where I was medical director. . .). Then she would add those non-patient care checks into the deposit to make the total right. I had never instituted a process for keeping track of all these little extra income stream things I did.
She even had the nerve to get me to sign a check for petty cash and then deposit it into the patient income account. I wasn't keeping a close enough eye on that stuff either, BECAUSE I TRUSTED HER.
I had been complaining for years that I wasn't making any money in this job, that I work TOO HARD to not be making money, that I only ever seemed to have enough money to pay the monthly expenses, and so on. She was stealing everything on top of the monthly expenses!
This whole story is not over yet. Once I can prove how much she stole, I may recuperate at least some of it because of an office business insurance policy I have that covers employee theft. She may or may not get jail time (she SHOULD get jail time, since this IS her third felony, but she is a mom of 5 kids. . . . Hard to know who a jury is going to feel sorry for: mom with 5 kids or MD??? hmmmmmmm
Bottom line: I have learned MANY things from this misadventure. Hope you all check your business insurance policies first to make sure they cover employee theft, then make SURE you do background checks & drug-testing on all new and old employees (this costs money up front but it could SAVE you in the long-run). Then make sure you have more than one person handling the money trail in the office (one doing posting, one doing deposits, etc). MAke sure YOU open the bank statements each month. They should come to you UNOPENED. That way there can't be any checks missing or altered. Make sure you have a second employee who knows how to do the money postng duties etc of the office manager and MAKE SURE your office manager takes vacation when you are IN the office, not only when YOU are out--one of the key things, I've found out, about embezzlers is that they never take vacation because someone else would be looking at the books and might figure stuff out.

It is VERY hard to take the time to be the Business owner as well as be the Provider of medical care AS WELL as be the Mom AND run the house. . .
As my grandma used to say: Just do the best you can! and keep your eyes open, ladies!

Hope,

Sorry to hear about your office manager, but thank you for posting what you have learned! BTW: I didn't know that there were insurance policies to cover employee theft.

Let us know how things turn out!

Melissa

thank you for your message and your helpful advice. my husband and i will be starting up practices soon, and will use your suggestions. all the best in a difficult situation.

Thanks for the warning! This would be such a painful situation. I wouldn't lay odds on what the jury thinks. People get pretty fed up with escalating medical expenses, and your former employee was certainly increasing them in more than one situation.

Hope,
This is a tradgedy, and all too common. One of the last classes in my MPH was accounting and involved employee fraud. I thought it was interesting information, but didn't realize that I would be seeing it in my own home in the next month. When I returned from my classes (which had been in another state from my home) I found that my au pair had embezzeled over $1600 from my home in just one month. We had made many of the errors mentioned in my class. A few key points I took away from the class and from my real life experience:
1. 10% of people will never steal, 10% will always steal, and 80% will engage in stealing if the "right" set of circumstances occur.
2. Never give one person total control of your finances. Always have a system of checks and balances.
3. Do just as Hope recommended and insist that your main finance person go on vacation while you are around so that you'll have a chance to give your books a healthy check up.
4. Don't make it too easy or too tempting to steal. This is where we were very guilty in our family. I didn't want to "insult" my au pair by asking for receipts, so there was no accountability when she was supposed to be registering my children for classes or paying for mail or dry cleaning.

My bottom line is my kids are safe and the theif is out of my house. She did this in the middle of a cross country move, when there was a lot of chaos and my husband and I were taking turns at playing single parent on opposite ends of the country. My big frustration is that the au pair company was going to place her with another family pending the results of the police investigation. I personally feel that is a second crime to put others at risk.

Hopefully I have learned my lesson and won't be victim to this type of crime again.