Employee dishonesty and theft at the workplace often costs organizations billions of dollars per year. I worked in an organization as a part-time employee; my job was keeping arranging files in the accounting department. The accounting department head was disinterested in the job and trusted his subordinates a lot. I overheard one top-level accountant explaining to his friend how their supervisor's negligence helped him engage in lapping. From their conversation, I gathered that he normally altered the receivable records to hide some cash he stole. This irregularity took place in the office while they were at work. This irregularity resulted in losses in the organization; I am unsure whether the issue was resolved as I left the organization before any formal investigation.
In this case, the ethical concern is funds embezzlement, which is a form of employee theft. According to accounting ethics, lapping is illegal as it involves the theft of organizational resources before the culprit covers their tracks by doctoring accounting records and statements (Seetharaman et al., 2004). In this case, the ethical issue is stealing of organization property, breaching of accounting code of conduct, and failure of the second accountant to report the case. These are ethical issues as employees are expected to be trustworthy and not engage in dishonesty. Also, employees are expected to report any misconduct by their colleagues to the management. In this case, accountant 1 engaged in dishonesty by embezzling the organization's funds. The other accountant failed to report the case to the management.
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This case falls under employees' theft in the organization. Therefore, there are different scenarios that are related. Some related scenarios are inventory theft, account padding, and phantom vending. All these situations result in financial and property loss to the organization. In order to understand the extent of this situation, there is a need to undertake further research to identify techniques that employees use to steal from the organization.
This issue is important to me as I am very interested in understanding how employee theft affects the organization's profitability. Based on my part 1 assignment, employee theft cost organizations billions of dollars (Walsh, 2000). Understanding how this occurs and how this theft could be minimized could help reduce the losses that organizations experience.
References
Seetharaman, A., Manivannan, S., & Periyanayagam, R. Anatomy of computer accounting frauds. Managerial Auditing Journal, 19 (8), 1055-1072. https://www.researchgate.net/deref/http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1108%2F02686900410557953
Walsh, J. A. (2000). Employee Theft . International Foundation for Protection Officers. https://www.ifpo.org/resource-links/articles-and-reports/crime-violence-and-terrorism/employee-theft/#:~:text=Billions%20of%20dollars%20are%20lost,over%20%2450%20billion%20dollars%20annually.&text=The%20same%20statistics%20show%20that,multiple%20times%20from%20their%20employer.
