Manager’s Desk: Shop owner deals with theft

I never experienced being sad and mad at the same time until recently. The cause was a trusted employee who wasn’t so trustworthy after all.

A few weeks ago, I received a call from our shop’s bookkeeper inquiring about several company checks written on a seldom-used bank account. She had received a bank statement in the mail and realized the account had an abnormally small balance. She assumed I had written the checks and forgotten to mention them. When I confirmed otherwise, her tone quickly changed to one of concern.

She immediately contacted the bank and requested details and images of the cashed checks. Unfortunately, this led to the discovery that our maintenance technician had stolen checks issued by two banks from the bookkeeper’s office and proceeded to cash checks worth thousands of dollars by forging my signature. We were stunned to say the least.

A logical question would be, “How can a maintenance technician steal checks from the front office?”

To summarize, a longtime family friend is the widow of a machinist who worked for our company. We hired her to clean our offices, which she’s done for many years. She’s very thorough, ensuring that work spaces are clean and well-maintained. She is also tough and doesn’t tolerate shop employees trashing the restrooms, and they comply.

But she also takes a 6-week leave of absence each summer to visit her hometown in Europe. While she’s out, we don’t replace her. The rest of us clean our own work spaces, though, perhaps not quite to her standards.

This year, however, we asked our maintenance technician to clean in her absence, including the front offices. We eventually found he had seen our bookkeeper remove checks from a cabinet and stolen some under the guise of “cleaning.”