When I began my HR career I was warned that employees and their representatives perpetually steal from employers by preying on many individual manager’s good will which, in turn, leads to the generation of operational inefficiencies – so that the employees or unions can eventually sell the consequent necessary productivity gains back to their employers through more pay, bonuses, benefits or just simply jobs. The public sector has been doing this as a matter of course for almost a century – but we all fall for it. It is like the cheat who borrows your pen and then tries to sell it back to you.
A few years ago I came across a law graduate who was disabled. They did not have to work for a living because they spent their time threatening to sue law firms that turned them down for professional training – on the grounds of disability discrimination. All claims were settled out of court and three claims a year produced a substantial tax-free income.
Then there is the spoof bank employee who calls you and claims to be from the fraud department. They want to carry out security checks on you – but there is no way to check them out. When you decline to give the data they suggest you call the customer services department to ensure they are who they claim. But they then leave the call open and when you re-dial a second person pretends to be customer services and hands over the phone to the original caller. You are trapped by the assumption you have been persuaded to make and then they have access to all your security details. When the real bank subsequently calls you distrust them, reject the call and they close your account down.
Dishonesty cannot be measured in court actions or dismissals as many things go undetected, get cast the “blind eye” or managers conspire in the whole process. I was once called in by an MD of a group of packaging companies to look at his operations located on the edge of London. What I found was deep-seated corruption which no-one thought wrong because it had become so much the norm. Employees asked managers for weekend overtime – then came into work and washed their car. Suppliers gave kick backs for orders that never reached the company in the quantities ordered – but were sold a second time for personal gain, managers were also given kick backs for ordering machines with too high a specification for the company’s needs, workers negotiated bonuses for working on machines and then removed safety guards, pilfering (even to the level of toilet rolls) took place on a massive scale…. And so on.
The world is drowning in rogue suppliers and spoof investors that gain access to company premises and when left alone type-up a contract advantageous to themselves and forge signatures from letters lying on the desk of their victims. This allows them to walk away and make a court claim on the company. When the company seeks to prove a forgery it has to do so on the signature alone – and the “con artist” has that covered as it would cost more to prove the forgery than simply pay their claim. Every day the courts are full of dishonest people using the due process of law to attack unsuspecting companies which frequently decide to settle before a final court decision to avoid ongoing legal costs. Meanwhile the perpetrator, who has been represented by a no-win-no-fee lawyer specializing in such crimes, walks away with their legalized theft. I know of this through direct past experience and even the private detective we called in to investigate the rogue party admitted that a similar crime had been played on him.
We have all lifted stones and seen the ugly creatures that live underneath and yet many companies are daily becoming such a dark crawling domain and the stone is getting too heavy to be lifted – even by auditors and fresh CEOs with a heroic remit for change.