Deal with it! Or face the inevitable consequences. When I say “deal with it” – you have a number of alternatives. Ask questions until you get the answer that best suits your situation.

A particular Dental Town Scam comes to mind.

jb

My first front office worker stole for 10 years until she was caught. She found me right after I graduated in the mid 70′s, got hired and set up her scheme. The investigation proved that she started stealing within two months of her employment. This occurred in the days of peg board accounting systems. Her method involved lost?/duplicate accounting cards and a fair amount of “white out” to make the sheets balance. Another trick was to make side arrangements with Spanish speaking only patients for discounts and report back to me that they were uncollectible or have moved out of town. She was bilingual herself but I had limited Spanish skills.

The damage that occurred to my practice was severe in terms of money/patient loss. The first criminal Court judge was going to send her to jail and she rose up in Court, approached the bench with her attorney and fired him. She was reassigned a new judge and got another attorney. She was eventually prosecuted and convicted in this case but was able to get straight probation because the judge ruled it was a first time offense. I blurted out in Court that she had been doing it for ten years so it shouldn’t be considered a first time offense. I was almost held in Contempt of Court for my outburst. At that point it was the DA’s case, not mine. The Court ordered that the amount of restitution was to be determined in civil court which required me to get a civil attorney and file a civil action. I did just that and got awarded a monetary judgement for what I could prove for the last three years. In California there is a three (or four?) year statue of limitations so she essentially got away with the early monies. I put a lien on her very nice home but she refinanced with Country Wide and my lien was wiped clean. That was another legal battle that I lost. In the end she made two very small payments and then declared bankruptcy which wiped out my civil judgement. This would not have been possible had the criminal Court ordered the restitution in the criminal case. In the end, I felt that I was victimized both by the Court process and by the employee. I could give a seminar on this subject from my experiences! I will be working longer than I expected in my career from this loss but at least I have a job and enjoy what I do.

Paying attention to the the financial viability of their practice may be mistakenly handed to their CPA. Unless that CPA is handling all of the bookkeeping functions of the office they are ill equipped or trained to detect fraud.

Financial functions of the office require the scrutiny that a working manager just does not have therefore they must have smaller “interventions” of the most theft prone areas through regular review. Catching problems early will be difficult because the amounts are usually small. Over time the schemes are cumulative and begin to raise flags.

Pat Murphy
LPT Security Consulting

I attended court yesterday to watch a former office manager who siphoned approx $5,000 a month for over 6 years from the practice recieve a conditional sentence. She walked out of the courtroom.

Embezzlements against dentists are very common and from y experience, even higher than churches and not-for-profits (which are rated the worst)

Bill
http://www.prosperident.com