|
Here are some of the places we are speaking soon. We'd love to see you at one of them.
|
Mar 5
|
Pacific Dental Conference, Vancouver
BC
|
| Mar 6 |
Cloud9Ortho Users Meeting, Atlanta GA |
| Mar 12 |
Tincher/ Butler Dental Lab, Charleston WV |
| Mar 13 |
Carestream Ortho Summit Atlanta GA |
| Mar 20 |
Dental Success Summit, Scottsdale AZ |
|
Apr 9
|
New Orleans Dental Conference, New
Orleans LA
|
| Apr 10 |
Dental Ceramics Group, Richfield OH |
|
Apr 14
|
Fox River Dental Society, Geneva, IL
|
| Apr 16 |
ITI Study Club, Burlington VT |
| May 8 |
Danville District Dental Society, Danville IL |
|
May 9
|
American Association of Endodontists,
Seattle WA
|
| Jul 15 |
Altura Periodontics, Denver CO |
| Jul 17 |
Patterson Dental, Nashville TN |
| Jul 31 |
Arkansas Association of Orthodontists, Little Rock AR |
|
Sept 11
|
Northeastern Society of Orthodontists,
Providence RI
|
|
Nov 5
|
ADA Annual Meeting, Washington DC
|
| Nov 6 |
Dr. Bruce Fraser Study Club, Columbus OH |
| Nov 10 |
Limestone City Study Club, Kingston ON |
| Nov 13 |
Academy for Orthodontic Excellence, Newport Beach, CA |
| Nov 24 |
Lexington Oral Surgery Study Group, Lexington KY
|
|
|
Our presentations have great titles like "How To Steal From A dentist" and "How NOT to Hire the Wrong People in your Practice".
To book a great speaker for your meeting or study club, please send an email here or call us at 888-398-2327. |
“We eliminate uncertainty for dentists with embezzlement concerns and maximize financial and emotional recovery for victims.”
|
Did you know?
|
Prosperident's team live all over the US and Canada? Our two most dispersed examiners live 2,496 miles from each other.
|
|
|
|
This Month in Our Electronic Store
|
Updated Questionnaire!
Our most popular online document, the Embezzlement Risk Assessment Questionnaire, is on sale this month.
This document allows a practice owner to quickly assess whether he or she is being embezzled. It recently received a number of updates.
Until March 31, this guide is available for $49, which is over one third off the regular price.
For a direct link to purchase your copy, click here. |
|
|
Are you working harder but earning less?
By Pat Little DDS FAGD CFE
While dental embezzlement is a touchy subject for many doctors, it is
a growing problem that cannot be ignored. You spend a lot of time and
resources training your team and getting them to "buy in" to your vision
of delivering quality patient care. We become close to our teams and,
in many cases, they become like extended family. How would you feel if
you discovered a valued team member has been stealing from you?
If you have been a victim of embezzlement, you already know how it
feels! Many of us think it is unimaginable that someone we trust could
resort to embezzlement. We spend most of our time delivering patient
care and must rely on our team members to handle most of the patients'
financial transactions. The combination of these factors provides an
opportunity for an employee to embezzle. In this article I will explain
the challenges you face, and how you can mitigate the financial and
emotional burdens that invariably result from being victimized by an
embezzler.
Dr. Pat Little is a former practicing dentist who is now a Senior Embezzlement Examiner at Prosperident. He is also a busy speaker -- look for Pat at the ADA Annual Meeting in DC in October 2015. This article originally appeared in Dental Economics.
|
Embezzlement is a Selfish Crime...
As
I was speaking somewhere a couple of months ago, and this phrase popped into my mind. I jotted it down and resolved to discuss it in a future newsletter column.
Embezzlers fall into two categories; there are those who steal from necessity, and others who steal, not because they need to, but because they want to. I recognize that there is some inherent subjectivity between these two, but for most embezzlers the delineation is pretty clear. We did an examination a few years back where someone was embezzling, and then they won several million dollars in the State Lottery. What did they do next? They continued embezzling! Clearly this was being done to address an emotional (as opposed to a financial) need.
When I speak with dentists about embezzlement, many of them have the feeling that certain attributes of them or their practices make them more or less "prone" to embezzlement. For example, many doctors believe that there is some correlation between how well team members are paid and their propensity to embezzle. Our research doesn't support this, and in fact points to a slight negative correlation; in other words, better-paid employees are slightly more likely to embezzle. (We have debated the explanations internally; personally I think that doctors with well-paid employees tend to believe that they have bought immunity against embezzlement and are therefore less vigilant).
However, what I'll tell you about embezzlers is that, regardless of whether they are stealing out of need or greed, they are very consumed by their own problems. They spend a lot of time thinking about how to steal (and how to cover it up), and their own needs. They spend almost no time thinking about you, their victim, and the swath of financial and emotional destruction that their actions create.
We are dealing
with employees who are powerfully motivated to steal and would do so in
whatever situation the found themselves. For this reason, I don't accept the widely-held belief that some doctors or practices are "embezzlement magnets", and I view victims as essentially selected at random.
Does this mean that you are powerless against embezzlement? Absolutely not. there are a few things you can do:
1. Hire carefully. Most dentists despise the hiring process -- understandable, but it shouldn't push you into taking short cuts. Once fired at one office, embezzlers are remarkably successful at getting hired at another office. Last month's newsletter had an article on avoiding hiring mistakes. If you missed this article, you can check it out here.
2. Systematically watch employee behavior. The one constant of embezzling employees is that they act in a predictable way. Thieves don't want to take vacation, resist your hiring of consultants, guard their duties and work space carefully, conspicuously point to their own honesty, and so on. Our Embezzlement Risk Assessment Questionnaire (which is on sale this month in our online store) provides a systematic way to assess and classify employee behavior. I'd recommend a look -- that questionnaire has helped many practice owners realize that they had an embezzlement issue.
Thanks for tuning in.
S
David Harris, MBA, CPA, CMA, CFE, CFF
Chief Executive Officer
|
|
Prosperident -- The world's largest dental investigation embezzlement firm
|
|
|
