Dishonor among thieves
If you believe Diana L. Farmer-Forston, since her early childhood life has been a struggle. But in many respects, her struggles are just beginning. Diana was recently sentenced to two years in prison for embezzling $567,000 from her employer, Bennett and Zydron, a Virginia Beach law firm. In an interesting twist, Diana ended up being scammed out of $300,000 of the fraud proceeds when she agreed to lend a co-worker money to cover expenses associated with their cancer treatment. Allegedly, Diana made her coworker sign a promissory note with a monthly interest rate of 4.5%. Thankfully, the coworker is cancer free. In fact, they never had cancer in the first place.
Hired by the law firm in 2005, Diana didn’t launch her fraud career until 2007. What happened between 2005 and 2007? Did Diana’s struggles from her childhood come back to haunt her? We do know from court filings that her husband of 25 years announced in 1999 that he had decided to undergo a sex change operation. Their marriage ended shortly thereafter. That revelation surely had an impact on Diana, but did it force her to commit fraud seven years later?
Here’s a hint: In many cases, you’ll never figured our exactly what drove an employee to commit fraud.
In Diana’s case, it would likely require extensive therapy to truly undercover the root cause. Diana’s attorney claims that she has struggled with depression and other undisclosed mental health issues since her childhood. He also states that Diana was also around physical, sexual and emotional abuse while growing up. She has apparently had a very difficult journey to date, but her struggles started long before she joined the law firm.
As an employer, you have to focus on what you can control. Certainly, before hiring a new employee, perform background checks, conduct a rigorous interview process and call references. Whether the employee experienced abuse as Diana apparently did it is legally, ethically and morally out of scope during the interview process. Remember, you can’t control what has already happened…
You can control what happens once the employee sets foot in the office. Once they join the organization, make sure that you don’t send messages that help the new employee rationalize that committing fraud is “ok”. Fraud prevention essentially begins during the interview process and continues throughout the employee’s tenure. Assuming that you have not hired an employee that is already an accomplished fraudster, your company has ample opportunity to prevent from fraud happening. I’ll detail many of the tactics you can use to build a culture that prevents fraud in my next post. This post hopefully lays the groundwork.
Bottom line: You can prevent fraud if you focus on what you can directly control. The employee already has ‘baggage’ that they bring to the table. You can’t control how much, or what it contains. You can control how your organization is positioned to prevent and detect fraud. There are no “fool-proof” approaches, but you have far more power than you realize…
Learn more about Diana’s case here
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