How Maggie's Seafood Restaurant
Recovered Its Money
Maggie Martin was miffed. One of her seven managers had just
stolen an $8,500 cash deposit from her restaurant's safe. So, she searched
the internet for information about employee theft.
She found www.TheftStopper.com and
called us. During our first conversation with Maggie, she told us she
wanted to give polygraph tests to all seven managers, since that seemed "the
only fair way to do it."
We explained that the law requires her to provide a basis for "reasonable
suspicion" to believe that every manager she wanted to polygraph was the one who
probably stole the missing money. We further explained that, based
on our experience, if each manager completed a Reasonable Suspicion
Questionnaire™, two or three of them would likely qualify as reasonable
suspects. And the thief would almost certainly be among those two or
three.
Maggie made her purchase and we e-mailed her the RSQ™, along with complete
instructions. Maggie had all seven managers fill out an RSQ
and then returned the completed questionnaires to us via overnight mail.
RSQ responses of the seven managers suggested that two of them were
reasonable suspects to have stolen the deposit:
- Amy was the newest manager. Some respondents suspected her just
because she was new and they didn't know her very well. One claimed he
saw Amy steal a waitress's tip.
- Edward's co-workers gave some interesting answers to this RSQ question:
"Have any of the suspects said anything or done anything before or after
this theft that make you think they might have committed this theft?"
One manager claimed "Edward is a highroller wanna-be."
Another said Edward "brags about attending coke parties of the non-cola
kind." A third reported that Edward "just leased a new Jaguar.
Instead of parking his new car in Maggie's free parking lot, he's been parking
it in a pay lot three blocks away." Finally, a fourth said "It
was Edward who discovered the money missing from the safe on Monday
morning. Before calling Maggie and reporting the deposit missing, he
left the restaurant without telling anyone and stayed gone for a good while."
Surprisingly, Edward agreed to take a polygraph test about the missing
deposit. He flunked the test and eventually confessed to stealing the
missing $8,500.
Why did his co-workers so readily offer information about Edward - one of
their own? Maggie's Seafood Restaurant has a profit-sharing plan that
includes every management employee. The managers realized that some of the
$8,500 loss would be coming out of their own pockets.
The Reasonable Suspicion Questionnaire™ gathers information from all the
suspects. This information becomes pieces of the theft puzzle. The
investigator puts the puzzle pieces together to solve the employee theft case.
A polygraph test is used to verify the investigator's conclusion, if necessary.
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