Asset misuse by employees poses a wide variety of threats to the average employer, particularly when its at the hands of your own employees. In some instances, its as simple as one employee misusing the company computer system and violating an employee permissive use policy. Other times it is limited to the theft of office supplies and postage. In others, it involves employees running a competing business right out of your company! The corporate investigators at ASG have seen cases ranging from misuse of a company vehicle to take a personal vacation to employees using multiple company work vehicles to perform side jobs after hours and on weekends. This second example involved employees directly competing with their employers for years! Some may argue that this is an extreme example and could never happen to them, but in 100% of the cases where we were retained by a company to investigate misuse of company assets, the company was in fact being victimized by an employee and the cost to the organization was material. In some instances, these have lead to undercover investigations. What is the most amazing about all is the number of different schemes that employees come up with that involve misuse of company assets. Renting out the company’s equipment to third parties, intentionally producing scrap product that is actually being sold by the employee, taking vehicles for recreation, hosting their own websites on company servers, even directing other employees to preform tasks that unknowingly benefit the ghost business. Potentially even worse is when the misuse of company assets results in liability for the company because their asset is involved in some type of accident or loss!
