Steal and Conceal; What Serial Embezzlers Can Teach Us

Episode Transcript

Auto-generated transcript: Steal and Conceal; What Serial Embezzlers Can Teach Us

You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests.

So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber. Wendy Askins and David Harris. Please talk about the issues that matter to you. You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners.

The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests. So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber. Wendy Askins and David Harris. Talk about the issues that matter to you. I am thrilled to be here with my two terrific co-hosts, Amber Weber and Wendy Askins, both from Texas.

Amber is a senior fraud examiner with us. She's been with Prosperident for about two years. And her area of focus is investigations, and also something we'll probably touch on a little bit later called Office Protection System, which is where we help people protect their practices. And my other co-hosts also from Texas are actually our longest serving examiner, Wendy Askins.

Wendy heads our orthodonic department, and also does a fair amount of work in orthodonic pediatric practices, but she has really seen every corner of Prosperident and has a huge amount of expertise. So terrific to be back with you both again, and with our audience. So today we've got a really neat topic. We're going to talk about serial and bezels.

And by serial and bezels, I mean people who steal in one practice and get caught and get fired, and then miraculously two weeks later, they're working across the street or across town. And they do it repeatedly in some cases many, many times. So we're going to talk a little bit about that group and what we can learn from them, and there are a lot of good lessons here. Hey, Steve. Well, you know, we are cross faired it,

and we are the largest dental and bezels meant to perform in the entire world. So we're also accounting geeks as well as investigators. So we love to know what the statistics are about, how and bezels meant isn't practically our dental industry. So what we know is that in 2019 ADA published their study, and I was a study of self reporting of how many of ADA members have been impacted by investment within their career.

So they're self reporting. And what they found was that 53% of the participants in the survey, recorded that they weren't quite sure that it didn't bezels or not. They didn't, they said that they just really didn't know. But what is absolutely fascinating for us as investigators is that 47% of their recordings had indicated that they had been a bezels from. And have a little bit under half of that, 47% had actually been in bezels from more than once.

I mean, look up here for the four or more times, 8% of the respondents had said that they had been in bezels from four or more times. That's absolutely just blows our mind. It's completely outstanding. But what we also know about in bezels is that there is a recidivism rate for people that invests or what we call serial investors. So what's the difference between someone who is just stealing? This is their first occurrence of stealing from your practice versus a serial investor

that goes around cannibalizing other dental practices. James, going to talk about that in a little bit. We don't actually know this statistics for the recidivism rate. What we do know for all offenders or incarcerated offenders in general is that 77% of individuals within incarcerated and released 77% of them, reoffend or will be arrested within five years of their negative consequences that were imposed because of their negative actions. So 77% is approximately what we can expect of the dental industry as well.

We got you now. Okay, now I'm sorry. So the next question is, is a bevelment gender specific? Our branded investigator Kelly Paxon has kind of coined this phrase of pink collar crime. Because a dentistry and a lot of professions that are care oriented such as nursing dentistry and child care, we have seen an increase in female and bevelers by 40%. However, in bevelment by males have only increased about 4% since 1990. One of those mean reasons is males may and bevel from dental practices,

but the administrative positions in our pink collar career are overwhelming we see males. So that's an interesting statistic about if an endovalment is gender specific. Yeah, and Amber, we get asked the question a lot because when you see our slideshow, they're predominantly females and relatively few males. So sometimes people ask me to do males in bezel and I think you answered the question, they absolutely do, but it's just a factor of how few of them work in administrative positions in dentistry versus how many females. Correct. So let's meet a serial and beveler and there she is.

Whenever I give you a serial and beveler's name, I stumble a little bit because they have many names. And this lady has gone by Lisa George, Lisa Jurgen, a different spelling of Lisa, another different spelling of Lisa. She lives in my hometown, which is Halifax Canada. And she said Dennis, and it didn't stop with Dennis. She has been known to rent expensive apartments, and then be unable to pay the rent, and just kind of fight eviction for as long as she can. She's also set up some phony businesses and nailed a couple of banks.

I've had the occasion to fire her at least once. She claims a lot of education that she doesn't have, including that she has finished or in some cases, has almost finished her law degree. She has always well dressed, very polished in her grammar and speech, looks professional. She's really well, knows practice, management software, really well. And the only thing that's really interrupted her stealing is some visits to the Krobar hotel. She's been charged in last time I counted with 110 counts of fraud, and has served 32 months in jail.

But when she gets out, what does she do? She goes back to what she knows best, which is working in Dell practices. So that's our adversary here. We're going to talk a little bit more about the personality characteristics of that adversary and maybe how to recognize them a bit better. But this is who we're dealing with. We meet two interesting groups at Prosperidan. The first group is the serial and bezels who we're talking about tonight.

The second group we refer to is the million dollar club. This is a thief who has stolen more than a million dollars from their practice. Here's one of each. The lady on the left, Irina, again, some different last names is in my mind the energizer bunny of serial and bezeling. So she has worked for and stolen from about 15 practices. The amount that she stole and then totals a little bit tough to pin down, but it's at least $200,000.

What I'll say about Irina is that even with all of the practice that she's had at stealing, she's not a great thief. The stuff she does is fairly basic. There's really very little effort to conceal what she's doing. She really tries to find doctors who she thinks will not pay a whole lot of attention to the the front office part of the practice and then she just takes money. One of them described her as a as a piranha wearing predators. On the other side, we see Christy Correll and you can see from the little logo in the

corner that she's a fairly accomplished thief. She worked for the same practice for 15 years and from that practice, she took over a million dollars. I would describe Christy as an artistic thief. She gave a lot of thought to concealment. Her stuff was very sophisticated. She carefully took into account what her doctor looked at and what he didn't. And she was able to do what I'm sure Irina would have liked to do, which is fine one doctor

and just ride them for a long, long time. So the good news for us is that as I say, serial ambassadors really are not generally that sophisticated and how they do it. And when you look at Irina, what she was really good at was getting hired. She got caught 15 times. You would think that somebody who got caught once would learn from it and make it a little bit harder to get caught this second time or the third time or the tenth time. And I read and never really progressed to that.

So that's the weakness that the serial ambassador has. The thing thing about what we see with ambassadors is they kind of have the personality of a chameleon. So let's talk about the definition of a chameleon. We all know that a chameleon can change its colors depending on the situation. So we see the same thing with a lot of ambassadors who are repeat offenders. They interview well. They are allowed to adapt to the situation that conform to what they're trying to accomplish.

Another interesting fact about chameleons. So we've got to look at this with him, Bezler. There are over 200 and two species of chameleons and they come in a wide range of colors. So when you look at a future employee's resume, you've got to look at it from that perspective. What you see isn't always what you get. They're going to change those colors depending on the situation when they see the opportunity. There are some kind that chameleons are not able to change their colors. This is called reptile dysfunction.

So sometimes it's they get in a situation where they can no longer change those colors. You found out what types of chameleons they are. The main thing you have to remember here is really to be thorough and look for holes in their resume. Make sure what the information that they're providing you is not false. You're checking their references and you have a good way of making sure that they're just not showing you some colors that are not true. Okay, so why are people still in the first place? Well, we know through crisis study and basically developed what's called the fraud triangle. And the fraud triangle is based on a three-proc system in which it describes what moves a person from not being willing to steal to being willing to steal.

So if you take two different people, given the same exact same circumstances, why does one person give over to the desire? And what person doesn't give over to the desire? Well, what crazy taught us was that the elements of a theory comes along with number one a certain type of pressure. Number two, rationalization in our own brains of why it's okay. And then number three, we need an opportunity or a doorway. Now, practice owners or business owners don't have any control over the first two aspects of the fraud triangle, which is pressure and rationalization, the only place where the business owner comes in is through opportunity. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later, how to lock this opportunities with our systems.

But pressure comes from either need or move. So if you have someone, let's say, oh my gosh, don't we have a lot of people in the Kevin situation right now who have either lost their jobs or they have been laid off. Those people might be tempted to steal because they have a need to provide for their family. Let's say they're behind on their mortgage and they're going to get foreclosed on. So they need to, a little extra money so they're going to take a little extra money from you to help pay for those. The other one, the other pressure point is just flat out greed.

And now with cereal and bestlers, we find the reason that they continue to steal really has nothing to do with need, but it simply has to do with greed. So with a cereal and bestler, you have the socio-pathic lack of remorse coupled with the narcissistic self-imposed importance in your practice and all of those work together to create an entitlement mentality, which means yeah they're going to steal from you but technically you owe it to them. So here is what the internal conversation would be with a thief. It would be, well I'm here before the doctor's here.

I'm, I get here before the doctor. I leave later than the doctor. The only reason this business is successful is because I keep that scheduling book full for the doctor and I make this practice run perfectly, but yet the doctor gets to drive a Lexus and I don't and I should be able to drive one just like he does or she does. So David mentioned our favorite cereal and bestler, I read up a moment ago. Let's hear what I read I have to say about her rationalization for the fact that she came in.

Because you're the greedy asshole, the one becomes to work with Ferrari, next day with Cours, and bills would come out for bleaching. And yes, even if I did take a thousand here, a thousand there, he wasn't hundreds of thousands and the doctors were doing more for that I ever did. But it's interesting to me because you hear, you hear two main things, two main reasons just the senses run right in together. Number one, you're the A-hole who shows up with a Ferrari, right? So there's a bit of jealousy there about why the doctor gets to drive such a nice car,

but I don't. And then number two, she blames the doctor and says basically well, the doctor was over billing or false billing being insurance companies. Yes, so what? I mean, you know, did the same thing only for a couple of thousand dollars, but you know, the doctor did it way more than I did. So that is their rationalization. So as far as the different accrucches that leads you to get into your practice to gain your

trust and to elevate themselves within your practice to a higher status, there you go. Thank you very much. Is that really when they come in, they were talking about Sierra Leunbestlers, remember, a serial of bests or goes from office to office, to office, cannibalizing each, cannibalizing the revenue from each individual practice, the schemes usually last somewhere between two to three years before they start unraveling themselves and they get close to getting caught. And so they'll put one place and they'll move onto the next and do the same thing.

But what's happening is when they move on to the next office, you think you're interviewing them, but they're actually interviewing you. They're actually looking at how well your office communicates, how well your staff members communicate with each other. They're looking at the systems you have. And the more chaotic in office is the more they sense that the office is, chaotic and unput together without systems, that's going to be their target office because the way that they elevate themselves to trust,

to gain your trust, is that they often have a safer, safer complex. And they come in and they say, oh, there's so much wrong with this office and our procedures aren't done the correct way. And we have some errors going on here. I can picture all that. I can fix all that. So what they do is they elevate themselves. They get in close and become deeply enmeched with the business owner.

So that the business owner doesn't suspect whatsoever that they're stealing from you. Or yeah, that they're stealing from you. They often want to take control of the clinical aspect, as well as the business aspect. They often get really involved in your personal lives. I remember the very first office that I worked at when I came into dentistry some 30 years ago. My very first experience with that was by the receptionist, and everyone in the office loved.

She would babysit the doctors' children for him. She would run personal errands for him and his wife. She became completely enmeched in the doctor's life as well as the team members' lives. So what this person might appear as or the characteristics that they might appeal to other team members is that one avenue is that they appear to be a sugar woman for the rest of the team. So for example, I had a case where the thief was a manipulating payable records. Well, while she was manipulating her and they were records, she was throwing out little bonuses to the rest of the staff.

Here and there she would just throw out a bonus to them. And then she would go to that individual staff member and she would say, you know, Sally, I think you're such a great member of this team that I gave you an extra $200 vagus on your payable check this week. Done to tell the doctor. Well, and the truth is what she had done is yes, she had given Sally an extra $200 that was unauthorized by the business owner, but she had given herself a $10,000 bonus on her unpaid milkshake that was unauthorized by the doctor.

So there's the sugar woman on one hand, but on the other hand, they can also be very controlling. Because remember, they have to keep control of their accounts. They don't like anybody asking him questions. They don't get transparent answers. And they certainly don't want you asking questions or going through. trying to validate what they've told you. Those are great points. And looking at the approach, we want to talk about the manifestations that will

see happen with people who are in besling. One of the main things that we'll see is when they are at questions about their role or what's been completed or if things were not done correctly, they play the victim. They've had a hard life, they have personal issues, they have things that make them just mentally doing more than what they should be completing. The other thing to look for is does this go beyond other parts of their work life? Did they volunteer a lot? Are they involved in a lot of extra curricular activities?

When the I know a case that you just recently had were in Bezelman occurred after you had confirmed that outside of the dental world, this person was very involved in horse activities and was also active in those many organizations. Myself being involved in horses and agriculture, I know that world. And I know that it takes a lot to sometimes achieve the goals that you have in that industry. Once it was revealed to us, that profanity that she had also been in Bezelman, from those organizations that she actively participated in.

And so this is where any relationship, business or personal, that transparency that you just talked about is very important. Another thing to really look at is a lot of times these people who can commit and bevelment, they're not doing it to build equity or hold on to what they feel. Personal story I have from growing up on a cattle ranch, we got somebody feeling some cattle from us. Most people want to accumulate cattle to build a herd or create value, but that doesn't work that way.

They just want to let it flow through their hands and go on to the next thing and continue that pattern. The great example of that transparency is looking through a prism. If you ask a staff member or the neighbor down the road, what happens to your property, they will clearly give you the details and have no issues answering that. However, if they have that issue of why don't you trust me or they blame someone else I had too much responsibility. I'm doing all of this work for everybody and they don't want to be clear and transparent

in that answer. That's also an issue. I know when to use it, it also told me a story about a case that when the embeds were was confronted, their first response was, oh my goodness, you don't trust me. They had built that more relationships with that office and then later on the embeds were husband notified that the doctor that, yes, she had admitted to him that she had stolen money. All these manifestations, the different personalities can happen.

But the key is you have to make sure there's transparency. When you ask questions of that team member, they are not afraid to give you detailed precise answers. Moving on from that, just like we do in all aspects of our lives, you have to protect your practice. We protect ourselves, we put automatic walks on our cars when we walk away, so when we go on that restaurant, our personal belongings are going to be safe in that car. So the same thing when we look at our office and our business, we have to have some form

of protection and all aspects. You know, an dental office has a lot of moving parts. So make sure you delegate to duties properly throughout your team members. You have a good hiring system, daily systems, and you're observing what's happening with your team. So you can see how their personality, do they have any, are they manifesting any qualities or things that I need to be concerned about? So that you're aware early on, if you are truly having great steps for protection in

your practice. Absolutely. Something that a lot of dentists struggle with is the difference between delegation and advocacy. And the best way I can describe this to you is that delegation, which you'd have to do to function as a dentist. I mean, you simply can't do it all. You can't be the kind of dentist in the dental assistant and the dentist and make a living.

So dentistry, most clinically and administratively requires you to offload some things to people. The really important question to list what their responsibility back to you is. And advocacy does really when you say to somebody, I'm giving you this job to do it. I don't ever want to hear about it. And that's the one to get you into trouble. Delegation is I'm giving you a job to do, but there's some accountability back to me. And I'm going to check on things I'm going to watch what goes on and going to expect

reporting and with expect transparency to go back to a point that I'm a meet on the previous slide. And something that a lot of dentists struggle with is that they need to be a little bit skeptical. The mere fact that it comes out of your computer and it's nicely formatted does not make it through. I think you're muted, Wendy. Yeah, I'm sorry. I was answering some questions.

Oh, good for you. Okay. The very best way to stop investment from happening in your practice is to stop a serial investor from getting through your hiring protocols or in other words to have stringent requirements before you're hiring. Now, if you have listened to our prosperity, how are our webinars before you know that we've done one on forensic hiring. I invite you to go to the Prosperident website and look under media, Prosperident power

hour and watch that recorded webinar on forensic hiring. I will give you a well of information that will be really good for you to know and how to establish your protocol for hiring. No one, you know, hey, who are you hiring? Right? It's amazing how many of us as dental professionals, we tend to lag behind other industries in the individuals that we hire. Also, it would be interesting to know how many of you during a hiring process have

someone proved to you who they are, a cloning meeting them, a cloning your initial interview with them. It's kind of like Dave said a couple of slides ago. We've introduced you to some serial investors and sometimes they can have three to five to six different names that they get by. So on the initial interview with them, just take a look at their driver's license number or I'm sorry, look at their driver's license and make sure that the name and the address on the driver's license matches of the name and address that they've given you that is on their application format that they've failed out. Now, if you don't do anything else about hiring, forget me for saying that day. If you don't do anything else, please please please call former employers to verify employment. Now, personal references that an applicant gives you. None done in bother with them right because what I'm going to give you the name of somebody that hates me.

Right. I'm going to give you the name of I'm going to selectively give you the name of people who like me because I want you to hire me. But when you call a former employer, and gives you more of a general roundedness of what type of employee that person was when they worked for someone else, you can also do a criminal records check. I absolutely love this idea, especially if you're hiring office managers or office administrator on financial coordinators or serial receptionist at the front desk. One of the things that you need to be concerned about when doing a criminal records check is that there is a delay in reporting in our systems. So here's where I mean, if you're in the United States, I'm in Texas and I want to hire a new office manager for my practice. I have an individual from Michigan that is moving to Texas and so they sent me their resume and I'm looking through them. I interview her. I'm lighter. So I go to do you just a criminal records check for that person. Number one in Michigan has committed the crime and they have been charged, but not yet convicted.

Just charged, which means they had a gone through the court system yet. You will not see that particular charge show up on a criminal records check. So I'm a little cautious about that. Another thing I'm cautious about is if you don't expand your search wide enough with including different counties, you might commit something counties all of the counties within the United States. For example, that's why speaking to former employers is so essential. Also, don't forget the Google and how much the Google can help you. A social media scan their Facebook page, LinkedIn, Instagram. I find it's interesting to go on those particular sites, especially if I have a suspect that I'm investigating. I like to get to that person's Facebook page and if it's public, I absolutely can do that without any conflict of interest. Go to that individual's Facebook page and look at the type of conversation that they're having with their peers. You can look at the grammar, their language, how their standard of living is. Do they look like that live beyond the standard of living for what their job qualifications and how much they make. So that can also give us a great insight into who it is that we're hiring.

Yeah, I want to amplify something when he said about quote character references. I always say to people, you know, if my dog could talk, he would give me a wonderful reference. Why? Because I feed him and I scratch his belly. He's not really objective and speaking with somebody's parish priest or their eighth grade science teacher or their former basketball coach, you know, that information is not objective and it's not an award context. We really need to talk to former players and if somebody has something to hide, they will go to all kinds of generations to make that conversation not half. For example, they will give you phone numbers that they say are former players, but are really in their own goal is going to give them a good reference. That's that's the kind of stuff that we just can't fall into. And I'll just repeat something we said at the beginning, you know, if you have questions just use the question part of. Of zoom and when you can Amber when they're not presenting a slide or usually pretty busy.

So dealing with with some of the questions, so. By only feel free to write them down whenever you get a second. So the next thing we want to talk about a form of protection is systems. So, you know, you've done the hiring, you researched everything, you've made sure everything checks out. Kind of like buying a car. We make sure the car has a good warranty everything's going to hold up. But if you just drive the car off the lot and you don't understand what systems need to be followed, later on. I'm going to have major issues with that car the same goes for your team members.

So for any business when you hire an employee, they can be your biggest asset, but also your greatest risk. Every night, your assets walk out the door and go home and face everyday pressures at home. Family issues, financial pressures and so many more the list goes on. So what does that tell us? Why does need clear boundaries? If they know that you are looking, they often won't take the chance of getting caught. If they think there's a chance of getting caught, they won't jeopardize their job security or cause family embarrassment. So that's where after you hire, you really have to have some great systems in place.

Here is where it's important that you are the gatekeeper. A great place to start is daily. Make sure you know how to print those reports and your team members are aware that you have the knowledge and that you're checking up on this on a regular basis. Also, after hours, so you can make sure that they know that you're looking at that. So don't be afraid to check everything after they're looking and know how that system is working. Make sure that system is being followed on complete and regular basis. Verifying the positive and making sure you're in depth and you have that transparency. You are verbally communicating that system also in writing.

Control in your incoming name. So you can make sure that employees don't pay for the opportunity to hide something from you physically.

that you're not aware of coming through. And one of the key things now with our new technology is making sure you don't have a signature stand. Many of those signature stands, and my former experience is an office manager, we're used for prescription, you know, to stamp that to give that patient to see the people when they walk out the door. Realistically, for your protection, your practice, your staff,

all aspects. The main number one thing you should do is not have a signature stand. That gives us a possible and bezler that has that chameleon characteristic to many opportunities to take use about stamps. The next thing I want to talk about is proper use and permission to control and your practice management software. So, doctors, you should look at your practice management software.

Just like it is the pulse of your practice. This is the financial pulse of your practice. So, just like we look at a patient, we look at their vital and we have a system on how we're going to take care of this patient and what we have to make sure, completely before we start anything. Your practice management software is just like the pulse of your practice. And make sure that you know what's going on while you're working on those patients.

So, the key thing to look for in this practice management software is to have permissions to do what you want to make sure that that's delegated. Not one person has permission to complete all transactions. And your team has to be accountable and answer to you and each other. This is where teamwork, this is a great definition of teamwork right here. Your administration access, you have tight controls pretty much you or one other person your spouse should be the only one that can make major changes

to your software. Like I said, the pulse of your practice. If you're the practice owner, we recommend that you have two separate login and user IDs. So, that you have complete control over everything. One is more for administrative and one is, you know, completing chart notes and things like that. The main thing here is that you require regular password changes. So, that your team members, you know, sharing isn't caring in this situation.

Even if they're not supposed to share their password, sometimes they may make it known to others. So, one of those things where we don't like the sandbox where we want everybody to share their toy. So, you want to make sure everybody's changing their password on a regular basis. And that if I get up and I walk away, we have a lot of moving parts in our dental office that I'm not active and logged into my system is going to automatically log me out.

You know, it's not just about other team members looking at things or seeing things, they shouldn't. We have patients and different types of people walking in and out. We need to make sure that everything has a time out on it. And the number one thing that will see in a lot of people who like to in bezel is they want constant access to that pulse of your practice. Right? They want to see that heartbeat going up and they want to be able to change that heartbeat.

So, in order to protect that plot line, really make sure no one has remote access to your software except for the practice owner. So, after hours, you're the only one that can act this any data. And we're just going to go back to one of these for a second because I just have a second. The third point on the slide, practice owner is just too long in I.E. Really what we're talking about there is as the practice owner you need administrative access, but it's probably better if you're not logged in with that administrative

access most of the time. So, what we're really encouraging you to do is to have a second login that has kind of more less the same powers that your reception says. And that's the one that you do most of your daily business in. And what that means is that if you are logged in in your workstation and you have to go way to treat a patient, what your login has is kind of a low power login ID and administrative one that somebody else can go and sit in your in your workstation and start changing things in the software.

So, you really need to reserve administrative access for when you actually need it. And that should not be your day to day login. That's really the point is right now, right? Just wanted to go back to that to make sure that people got that. And the thing that I looked for that, you know, that's really kind of the pulse of the practice. That's where a lot of moving part tap and so think of it as that. Absolutely. There are thousands of ways to steal and we at cross-curtained.

No, no most of them and we're uncovering new death methodologies, almost a weekly basis. One of the issues that we struggle with in our prosperity team is trying to communicate with you. How to look for investment without actually getting away to it's on how to invisible. And a public forum such as we're doing right now. Although there are thousands of ways to steal each accounting transaction and with a reaction that we as investigators know to look for. But as not investigators in your practice, what is it that you look for? Well, the association of certified fraud examiners comes out with an annual report each year of theft that has been recorded by certified fraud examiners such as we are. Basically what they continue to show year after year is that despite the industry, no matter if it's dental or healthcare or construction, whatever the industry, whatever the amount of theft is the $30,000 or a million dollars.

The actual tech and calorie of the method is different or varies between each that but one thing that's consistent. One thing that is consistent is the behavior of the thief and the two things that you want to look for the most when you're assessing behavior of your employees is how much time they want to spend alone working. We know that collusion doesn't happen very often in dentistry. There are some industries that it does but it doesn't have a very often in dentistry. So if I'm not colluding with someone who's helping me steal from you, that means I have to be alone, which means I have to come in before everyone else. I have to stay later than everyone else. I can't take vacation. because someone might look into my accounts and buy out what there's something wrong. We've had several cases where the theft has been first

suspected because the ambassador took vacation and the doctor had another employee and so the folks at the front desk, well, low and behold, a patient called saying, I got a statement and I don't see my cast payment on my statement. That's why an ambassador can't ever take off work. They always have to be there to manage their schemes. Another thing is that you find that they're not

transparent and they're incredibly possessive and forceful of everything around them. They're workstation. They're their accounts. They're accounts receivable. Their paths do accounts. They don't want anyone else to have their hands in this or their eyes and it's so that they can start seeing errors that are coming

up or delete a payment set of come-up somewhere. And then we discussed a little bit or Dave's going to talk a little bit more about characteristics of a sociopath and a narcissist, which also played a lot of plays along with the Invessage Personality or behavioral characteristics to watch for. And this goes back to something that we touched on earlier. The one-time ambassadors, the people in the steel and get caught and leave dentistry or reform themselves,

are a little bit different in their behaviors than the serial folks. And one of the things that we started realizing as the three of us were preparing for this was that a lot of the serial advisors that we've encountered are sociopathic and a bit narcissistic together. In other words, we tend to find those two in one place. And I wouldn't say that about the broader community of Invessage. I would say it about the serial folks. So what does sociopath be looked like?

Well, superficial German intelligence is part of, you know, these folks come off as people are fun to be around generally on their own. Probably the key to finding characteristic of sociopathies that you just don't feel bad about. And certainly when we interview these folks, you know, as I think Wendy said earlier on, you know, they feel like Dirty, I deserve it. You will see any social behavior for them. And sometimes for no really good reason.

They really don't think they'll get caught. And when I talk about my favorites serial and bells around Vietnam, you know, I think every time she got caught you the surprise bite, it's kind of like my mother-in-law and get surprised by Christmas every year.

And they just don't learn what you would think they would have the opportunity to learn from what's happened to. I'm not making this stuff up. It's coming from something called DSM, which is the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental diswork. That's kind of the the psychiatrist and psychologists by, in terms of how they define different abnormal behavior. So that's sociopathy. Again, basically it's, they don't really seem to care about consequences or the damages that they create for other people. And then we've got narcissism. And I think we all have some idea of what narcissism looks like, but let's let's make it

explicit here. Some important reason where that comes out in the dental practice is these people look at you basically as a high functioning more on the videos. And in their mind, I think Amber said this early on. In their mind, the only reason that you're successful is that because they keep you're cheerful. And then when people get out of that share they collect the money. And they kind of look at you and them and they face you as for they see themselves as a being you are equal. Whether that's true or not, that's their perception. And they kind of think you should make them your partner in the practice. And eventually, when they realize that that's not going to happen, they feel front. Narcissists tend to be a little bit

of parents obsess. These are the people who will have hundreds of salties on Facebook. You know, these are exaggerators, especially about themselves. I mentioned the one of our serial and as largely a sledge Georgia early on who claimed they have all kinds of degrees that she did now and you know, that lot of degree that was just about that's narcissism. They think that really only high status people can understand them. And they have this constant e-forcer of the regulation of the e-forcer. They lack empathy and that's also just some extent a characteristic of sociography. And they cover what you have and they think that if they just had a fancy card like you do that people would think more of them. There's a real challenge to narcissists and

you know, their emotions are right there in front of you. And they really crave that adulation. Again, when we started talking about it, we realized how a lot of the messengers have characteristics of both narcissists and sociopaths and a little bit of research I've done since I had that epiphany kind of reinforces it. So that's what these folks look like.

Um, we could probably use a little bit of humor above now. And there's something we came up with that we call the serial and buzzer affair. Let's, let's all read it together. Please go and let my doctor wake up tomorrow in every day with all the goodness, kind or any of these constant altruism that you and your infinite wisdom bestowed. So that I may continue in the noble profession of investing. And thank you God for the creativity that you've granted me so that I may continue my undetected accumulation of luxury goods. And please learn allow me to continue your work by spearing the doctors in the sense of materialism and delay the eventual loss to the world of his or her skills through retirement. And dear Lord, should I ever be

caught? Please ensure that this great goodness that makes people care more of her a great goodness that admired by her. Well, does not desert that dentist in my time of need. It always amazes me how many dentist don't report the ambassador because the dentist feels bad for that person. So that I may continue the words work, I see a link from some of their unsuspecting sap, your sociopathic and narcissistic servant, the ambassador. And I know we're being facetious, but the majority of dentist I've met are such wonderful,

nice, altruistic people. And the advisors know that the serum and bellers will take advantage of it over and over again. So we can have a laugh here, but there's a lot of truth in what's here. You say you wrote that comment on what I was saying? All by myself. Good. I did. I'm just sitting at a conference.

I just realized how much of the number of people to get managed of the really fundamental goodness that most dentists have. Yeah. Okay, so we've already told you and you know quite clearly we are most fair at end. And we have a gift for you coming up at the end of this presentation. But here's how we can help you or we actually are very active in helping the dental industry. I kind of like to think of it as we're saving the dental industry.

Maybe there's a bit of narcissism and need Dave that we're saving the dental industry. Anyway, ways that we can help. Number one, we can do a full-on investment investigation for you. If you happen to feel that something is just not quite right, we could also do compliance examinations as well where we actually go through your database and look at all the individual transact financial transactions that are happening. We also have a product offering called Office Protection System which is actually one of ambers' specialties.

The Office Protection System is a program in which we examine 25 or a little bit more than 25 highly functioning areas in your office or a protocol as assistance so that we can help you find to them to decrease the risk of the measurement within your practice. And then Dave, why don't you tell us about the pre-employment screening? Absolutely. And this is a product that we hope to be offering soon in. It's where one of our skilled and experienced people will be able to help you with pre-employment screening and making sure that you're not hiring somebody who's got some magic.

It's a really complex area in a lot of ways and it's a product that is not easily accessed by most practices and something that we are forward to being able to obviously, so there will be some details coming out probably in the next few months. We have not finalized anything yet but we get a lot of calls for this and we're just in discussion with somebody right now. We think we'll be able to offer an excellent service to develop practices. So stay tuned for an announcement. One last thing I'll say about employment and this was pressure on earlier but dentistry has really allowed it to get out of step without the rest of the world fires.

And unfortunately most dentists end up making hiring decisions with far less information than we really should have. We're going to help you close that. Okay, so here are some resources that we at Prosperity can offer you. I've been writing my whole unit as because we have a ton of questions, a really good questions. And I runically a lot of them have to do with hiring. So we're going to answer those and just to be it. But one thing that I want to point out to you is one of the questions that we've got was,

for example, can I ask when I call somebody where I call a former employer, right? We'll talk about that during our question and answer portion of our webinar. But what I think is amazing and this was David's brainchild I believe is that we've taken not only cases that have come from Prosperity and we've created a central part of our website and it's called the Hall of Shame. So basically it's a list of people that have committed crimes or investments related to dentistry. So although if you call a former employer of an investor, they may not be able to exactly tell you what went on. Within, right? But what you can do is go to the Hall of Shame on the Prosperity website. Type in that person's name and see what comes up for them.

Now, you know, I want to be real careful because, like you know that we're not. This is not like a guarantee of like a criminal records type of thing, but it can give you some type of idea. Another option that we have, or another resource that we have is called the Industrial Risk Assessment Questionaire. We've talked a lot about behaviors as being one of the key indicators of if someone is a best-selling from you or not. Prosperity has developed a list of 30 or more key indicator behaviors that will let you know if you should. Begin searching a little bit more deeply about if an employee is a best-selling from you or not. If you will send an email request to request at demlimbesselment.com, Dave has agreed to give that. E-wreck list of behaviors to everyone who is attending our webinar today, and he's going to do it for no charge. So that's kind of you for that day.

Thank you. But I know my clients absolutely love that. Don't forget that Dave has a book on Amazon. You can see that mine is well-born. And it is called the artifact and the science of control. It's an easy read. It's a well-rounded. Read. It's a well-rounded look at in-besselment in the dental industry. And I'm not to say. that because I love David Harris. And I think he's brilliant. I'm saying not because this is an excellent book with excellent information. Yeah. Okay. And then also we love bringing you guys webinars. We love that you're interested in protecting your practice against investment and we love that you're relying on us as a source for that. So much so that we believe that offering free

webinars with this information is incredibly important. If you have a moment and you've enjoyed this webinar and you've learned from the information that we're offering you for no charge, which will please do us a favor and go on the go and leave us a leave us a leave a little bit about how we've done or how our prosperity has impacted the dental industry altogether. If you would do that for us we would really appreciate it. Okay. Perfect. Well, if you need to reach us for any reason, there's how to do it. Our email addresses are all there. The website, the toll free number. Feel free to reach out to any one of us or to call the number or contact us through the website. If you have questions or you want to talk about your

practice, we would love to help. There's some of our team that was taken last year or had office in Halifax, Canada. You can see Amber and Wendy are kind of the bookends and I'm somewhere in the middle. Yeah. That's it, Wendy. And at that I'd like to thank my delightful co-hosts. It's such pleasure working. We put a lot of time into preparing for these things. I've got to say they're so much fun to work with and they have so many good ideas that this webinar is sharing that we're doing is just an olive or a love that I think for for me and that probably for my co-host as well. At that ladies, fire way. What do you want me to go?

Today, there's a great question. If you find someone's feeling money, how do you get the money before letting them go? That's a great question. It's one that I get asked a lot when people call and they have concerns about a development. The way the question is often phrase to me is, you know, should I keep this person around? You should I fire them? Because investigations usually take six or eight weeks to happen. Do I need to keep them around for that period of time? And the answer is you absolutely do not. If you've caught somebody's feeling, step one is fire them. Step two, investigate, document, and then you can work on getting your money back. But what people don't always realize is that you don't lose any recourse by letting that person go. In other words,

there's no need to kind of catch them right in hand and have them still working there when prosperity gives you the final report. Right, indeed, that also falls in that target falls in nicely with what we're going to be talking about in August and we're obviously not talking about it. It absolutely does. The other part of that question was how to get the money back? We'll talk about that next week, but I'm sorry, next month. There are really three ways you can do it. The first is that you all have someone insurance coverage for this. The typical amount of practices has 25,000 dollars, which is not a lot. But if somebody's stolen that amount of less, you get a back from the charts. Beyond that, you're working on either getting money back

from the thief, which sometimes can be a challenge. Or if somebody's been catching your checks, you have the ability to go after the bank that allowed those checks to be cash. So those are the other ways to get money back. But they really have nothing to do with, they don't require you to prolong somebody's employment. A statement, I'd like to make, and then two questions for you, which are related, are very own Cali-Caxton, who works with Prosperitan and who coined the term paint color crawling.

Made the statement to be consistent with open source intelligence when you're doing research on social media, because if you don't apply the same standards to each individual applicant and what you're looking at in social media, it could be considered to be unfair hiring practices. So she suggests if you're going to look at social media at your applicant, that you have a checklist, and you apply that consistently among every applicant that you have. So thanks shout out to Kirlie Patston for that. Okay, so two questions. Number one, how do you handle it when someone works for someone else at the current time and they don't want you to call their current employer for a reference. That was a question by more reading, and the other question is what can you legally

ask when calling a reference? I'm calling for a reference. Two awesome questions. Let's tackle that first one. So we're obviously facing this problem where we get somebody who's applying for a job, but they say, please don't contact my current employer because she doesn't know that I'm looking. And as somebody who's looking to hire somebody, there's an obvious danger here. This may be true. Or it may be that the person applying for work is you actually got fired three weeks ago, and this is their way of preventing you from calling an employer who just fired you. So when you get that, here's what I recommend you do. You say to that employer, you say to that applicant, look, I understand that completely, and I would never want to get you trouble with your current

employer. But I'm going to tell you that we don't hire anybody without speaking with their most recent employer, but if that's going to be awkward for you now, I'm happy to put that to the end of the process. We'll check off all the other boxes first, and then make that call after we made a written off our employment team subject to that phone. And when you tell somebody that, what you're doing is really a little exercising differential diagnosis. If the person who's applying is playing again with you, what you just told them is you're not going to get hired, because I must have that conversation with your former. If it's a legitimate request for somebody, you really is still working there. Then you've accommodated them. You've created a structure

where you're not going to put them in a difficult position, and they should appreciate that. Wendy, I got sort of wrapped up and asking you to answer that question, and I forgot the other one. Can you give me a reminder?

What questions can you legally ask when calling for a reference? You can pretty much ask anything as long as it's not of a discriminatory nature. And I'll go back to something. So Kelly Paxman, who we mentioned a medical, for those of you who don't know Kelly, she works with us. Kelly is a private investigator with a very, and certified Friday's in her with her extensive law enforcement background. And Kelly is the world's leading expert on what's called pink color crime, in other words female committed and female.

So what Kelly was saying was, we need to treat all applicants equally. And that's true when we're looking at social networking or anything else. If hiring practices are differentiated apply to different groups, the equal opportunities legislation will get you in trouble. So for example, you cannot give Hispanic applicants a literacy test but not apply the same thing to applicants where English is the first language. That would be discriminatory. So we can't ask questions that would be discriminatory.

For example, in most states, a woman's family planning, you know, whether she's planning to have children or not. And when it's just something that is considered discriminatory to them, you can't ask the applicant that question. You also can't ask a partner employer. Aside from that, you can ask them anything you want. The important questions to ask though are, first of all, don't ever skip over this question, would you be hired in this person?

Okay, that's the absolute best question you can ask the partner employer. Because anything other than yes, of course, should concern it. The second question you really must ask is the applicants start date with that employer and their end date because you want to compare those to what the applicant told you in case they're trying to hide a job that they don't want you to know about. And the third thing that you really need to ask your partner employers, what was this person's job title and the left you? A lot of applicants will give themselves the upgrade to first class.

In other words, in their last job, they worked as receptions. But when they're submitting a resume to you, it's magically become office manager. And if you ask the partner employer to get a question, of course, you'll catch the applicant in a deception and somebody lies to you on the way in the door. It's not going to be a great employee to have that to that. All right, any other students you should we should tackle?

Yeah, I have a great question. Please go in more depth about roll up reports and after activities. What exactly should the practice owner be looking for? Okay, so what we mean by roll up report is if well today's Wednesday. So when you when you print and reports have different teams in different practice management software, what I'm going to talk about is a day and report. So most of our all software, in fact, has a summary that comes out at the end of the day

that says, here are the fees, here are the collections that came in, here are the adjustments that are made. And that's your primary reports, we're looking at your end of day. We did a session back in May called Reckings Sour Records, where we went in a lot of detail here and I encourage you. If you didn't see that webinar alive to go and dig it out on our website and look at it because there's a lot of good information on what you're looking for at the end of the day. What we mean by a roll up report is this, the report I want to see at the end of Wednesday is

one that is from when the office closed, let's say, five feet on Tuesday until the end of Wednesday. If the report I get is a Wednesday report only, then what could have happened is somebody could have come in at night on Tuesday and done some transactions. I won't see them if I specify today as the day only. And I don't go back to the last report that I have. So if the last report I have is from five feet on Tuesday, now I want to go from there until the end of today. That's what we mean by a roll up report. Right. And can I add to that?

Dave? You bet. Okay. So the other thing with after hours activities is when you look at your password and security settings. You want to make sure like on how we talked about you don't want anybody to have remote access to your system. Because if they had the accessibility to get in there and enter any, or anything that they shouldn't have. So that's where that also plays into remote access for just you. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, one of the things that we have talked about in other sessions is. Sorry, last my train to thought they're told. But one of the things that we talked about in other sessions is looking at the burglar alarm. Blog is called sometimes the entry log or the access log. And that tells you if somebody's coming into your practice after hours. One of the dangers of staff having remote access is that now they can sneak into the. Into the practice without having to argue this arm that alarm. He means they can do it in a virtual sense instead of a physical sense.

So I agree completely with Amber. We want to cut down. People's ability to do stuff after hours on notice. And if we pull the plug out remote access, we we get a lot better ability to detect. I have another question that goes into that day. What if your software only pull Dave and not and you're not able to back to the prior day at five o'clock? I've yet to see software that will actually do that. I think if you're having that problem. You probably need to ask that question of your software trainer or where will you.

You're a little expert is. Because I've never seen software where you can't specify a longer period than than this morning to this afternoon for day. And if it really wasn't obstacle, I suspect what the way you could transcend it would be to go and reprint you know again we're having this conversation on Wednesday. If you went back to your software and reprinted Tuesday. That should catch transactions that happened after obviously Tuesday and then Wednesday would bring it up to date. Right. I'd like to share something that. Tabitha.

I want to ask that the Tabitha shared. She says FYI in Dentrix, you can turn on the verified user to add a second level to the login for each access point. Example, if the doctor is logged in and has access to admin areas, the system will prompt for password

before allowing access. That way, if they leave their station while logged in, and someone else sits down and tries to access critical areas, they are still blocked due to verification steps. Yeah, that's a really good information. Thank you, Tabitha. Yeah, Tabitha is a consultant in a friend of ours

and knows a whole lot about dentrix. The other thing I'll mention too, on the same theme, is that there's some stock where now it will support biometric readers. So this is a fingerprint device. And these things used to be really expensive when they first get out, but the hard ones will buy a metric reader now,

it's pretty cheap. I mean, you can find them. I've seen prices kind of from 30 to $70 for a biometric reader. So that's another way to create an additional level of security, really in passwords. Where that's particularly important in my mind is when your employee hours are being kept in your practice management software,

because it's a chronic problem where people sort of will only each other in a note. And the biometric reader kind of shuts that down really nice. The question that I had Dave's back Christine was has there been an increase in investment due to COVID. And I'd like to take that as a two-part question, I'd like to take first part of it. What I've noticed in my case load

is that it has increased. And the reason that I, what I hear my client saying is, they had to be shut down for a couple of months or I still shut down due to COVID. And since they have a section of time, they're trying to be efficient and go through their practice, reset their protocols and their procedures and their reviewing their reports

to look at their financials. And when they're reviewing their reports, they're finding a lot of anomalies that they would not normally find if they hadn't taken the time to look at the reports. So for my end, yes, as an investigator, I've seen an increase. I don't know if it's actually due to COVID,

other than just that for several times on their hands now. Do you want to take the second part of that, Dave? That absolutely, and my experience has paralleled that of Wendy.

The other thing is, as was said earlier in our presentation, a lot of people steal for two reasons. They either steal to address and ego deficit or financial one. Well, there are a lot of people right now who suddenly are in financial trouble. Let's face it, COVID has cost people lose their jobs. There's a big adjustment going on in the economy.

When do you never know where talking before we started? Wendy's husband is an airline pilot and fortunately, he's not facing layoff. But there are a lot of airlines, for example, who have a lot more people right now than they really need. And they're laying them off. And if you have somebody working for you and you spouse loses their job, it creates financial resources.

So that's the other part of the COVID issue right now. Christine asked that question. Christine, you're issues. She's one of our investigators. And thanks, Christine, glad to have you with us.

Dave, what is required to file theft issues with insurance? I'll give a kind of self-servient answer to that.

Normally, the report that we give you at the end of the investigation is what both law enforcement and your insurance company need. It's pretty rare these days that an insurance company will ask us even a single question. Wendy, you've been at this for a while. I mean, how often do one of your reports can we get any kind of meaningful question

from the insurance company these days? Oops, let's remove it. Nothing coming out there, Wendy. Sorry, I was just going to say, I don't know. What interest companies pretty are? Generally, each of them will have a list of documentation that they require. One thing that I love about the cross-beard

that final report of findings or theft report is that it generally has about 99% of the questions that the insurance company is going to ask and the documentation that they require. We include that in our final report. However, sometimes they like to get for us to get count on some volume. And if you think about it, it's kind of the same

that's if you're filing dental claims. How often does the dental insurance company fight you to the nail or paying a claim? It's the same with a theft claim. That's why I think our reports are so valuable in that process. But does that answer your question? There's a lot. And that's another reason why you should hire a cross-beard

in. There's just a lot. It's very detailed. OK, it's going to say that. That's not wrong for a gene, but it's great. It's the truth. We like to say down here in Texas.

And I think you need to go say it, right? Yeah. But someone more in wants to know also, is it legal to have cameras put in the office and not tell employees? Yeah, that's a good question. It depends on your state. And about 30 states are what are called one-cardic

lesson states. And that means that one-party to a conversation or an interaction between people can authorize the recording. The other 20 states are what are called two-party states. And that requires both parties to a conversation and all parties, if there are multiple ones, who can send to the recording. So if you're in a two-party state or an office,

I think an all-party state might be a better label. Then you can't do it. The employees would have to know. And furthermore, patients or whoever else can send the office would need to be as aware as well. So that's where you need the cameras. where you need a sign that tells people that you have cameras in place. In a one-party state, again, where you can kind of

you will literally consent, you could do it. Do I think it's a good idea? Not really. Sooner or later your employees will probably find out when they wonder what's in that room that's always kept locked in the practice. Certainly, if you're doing it and you haven't told your employees, you're going to lose a lot of faith, a lot of faiths with them.

So I don't recommend hidden cameras. I think if you're going to do cameras, make them, make them over it. And tell people you're doing it. The other thing I'll say, and I know when you can never will, this will probably parallel their experience. We've been at this for a long time. And the number of thefts that we've seen on cameras per small.

The basic practical problem that people forget is this. If your office is open 35 hours a week, and let's say that you need two cameras to cover the front desk properly, you're now shooting the 70 hours a week of front desk camera video. I basic question to the audiences, why don't you go watch it? Even if you spit it up five to one, which makes people the conical in what they're doing, that's still

14 hours a video to watch each week. So the problem with the video is monitoring. It's a little bit different if you know or you suspect in bezel, I mean, at that point, you can install video. But what I say is if you know you haven't bezel, you're going to fly out of people anymore. Yeah. I think I have one last question, and it was about what,

what type of insurance covers fraud and theft? Oh, yeah, we didn't tell people that didn't we? I get we'll get into more detail on this next month when we when we talk about kind of the aftermath of a bezel. The coverage is in your property insurance, so it's the same stuff that covers fires and floods and since my co-vocers are already taxes on all that, turn needles.

And so it's your property insurance that has the coverage, the specific coverage is called employee dishonesty coverage. And the default amount that's in most policies is 25,000 dollars. Now, I'll just mention that the average and bezelment that we see is about a hundred of dollars, so when suggestion on make is this would be a great time to think about calling your insurance agent who's holding your property insurance and asking

what the cost is of increasing that coverage. And a lot of times that cost is pretty small. I mean, sometimes it's 20 or 25 dollars a month to increase your coverage to something a little more meaningful on that would probably be a really good thing to do.

I think we've covered most of the questions I would again like to thank my partners in crime or in crime prevention when in the amher for being with us. And we enjoyed having you and feelings on fantastic questions tonight. Thank you very much. Have a great day. Please stay far away from COVID. And we look forward to being back with you in about a month.

Bye.

Wendy and David will be back soon with another episode. Thanks for listening to the dental practice on our podcast. Brought to you by Prosperidant. You can contact Prosperidant through its website www.prosperidant.com or by calling 888-398-2327. If you have questions about this podcast,

if you would like to discuss your practice or there is a topic you would like to see in a future podcast we would love to hear from you. Amber, Wendy and David will be back soon with another episode.