The Dentist Money Show Podcast - Embezzlement Warning Signs You Need to Know

Auto-generated transcript: The Dentist Money Show Podcast - Embezzlement Warning Signs You Need to Know

Hey, Dennis Money Show, listeners. This is Ryan Isaac. I'm very excited about today's interview. This is with the great David Harris from Prospera. I'm not joking when I say we talk about murder and fake names and disguises and lies and fraud and deceit and Inbezzlement, it's crazy how common Inbezzlement is in dental practices. Grab a pen and a paper, take lots of notes you're not going to want to miss this episode. Just a reminder, please join us in our free Facebook group where we post questions and polls and have great discussions. Go to denestetvises.com slash group and join up or if you want to chat with us, go to Denestetvises.com, click on book free consultation and schedule appointment to chat with one of our advisors today.

You can also call or text us at 833DDS plan. Thanks again for tuning in to this episode with David Harris. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show. Consult an advisor or a condenser-owned due diligence when making financial decisions. General principals discussed during this program do not constitute personal advice. This program is furnished by denestetvises or registered investment advisor. Welcome to the Denest Money Show, where we help Denest make smart financial decisions. I'm your host, Ryan Isaac, and I'm here today with a new friend of the show. Mr. David Harris of Prospera, then. How you doing, David?

Good. How are you, Ryan? I'm doing well, man. I'm, uh, how's we here to say? And I'm excited to have you on the show. You've worked with some of our clients in the past. Been listening to other interviews you've done lately, so I'm excited to have you a lot of questions here. So. I'm not your mate. Yeah, that's the point here. I'm excited to have you on here. So the first thing I'd love for you to, and you do this all the time,

but I'd love for you to give a little background on where things started from you. I've learned for myself that you've had a really cool background. What's up with, I wrote some of these quotes down. You called yourself, uh, you were a self-proclaimed, miscreant, and a self-proclaimed under a cheever. And now you run this, like, massive, the biggest dental fraud and bezelman firm in the, in the world, probably, right? Yeah, you know, when I was in high school, I think my parents just spared that I would ever make anything of myself. And I actually ran into my own history teacher a couple of years ago, and he remembered me. And, and because I was so undistinguished and, and I said to him, yes, I remember you trying to teach me history, and that it was painful for both of us.

So, academically, I wasn't much of an achiever and got in some trouble and ended up joining the army because it sounded a whole lot better than jail. Oh, that's right. Yeah, I remember you're in that. Had a, had a chance there to, um, really sit and think about how differently criminal's not than everybody else. And I, I had a job where I was breaking into military bases as a way of improving the security. Really, that was, uh, you kind of, you're describing your background's like my dream job. Like I watched those shows where they take X-Cons and they bring them into the FBI to, you know, no offense to everyone I work with. I love my job, but that's kind of my dream job, you know, that's really cool. So you kind of, you kind of did that. I did that. And that's when I really started thinking about how, as I say, criminals approach the world differently than everybody else.

And that knowledge is something that I still use every day. And certainly our, our good investigators are really a depth at putting themselves in issues of a criminal in a certain situation. And saying, okay, if I was going to steal in the situation, how would I do it? Yeah. And, and that's what, that's what distinguishes a skill investigator from an average one. Yeah. And, and yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking that way. And then I had one of those chance occurrences. I, after I left the army, I worked for a bank for about five years. I had, my job there was sitting at home and sort of thinking about what I was going to do next. And I got a call and it was a guy who had been in high school with who was now a dentist. And he said to me, I think my friend has person stealing and I have no one else to call.

So I really wasn't very busy that day. So I said, all right, I'll come over to the practice afterward. So once he closed up, I came over and we found what she was doing fairly quickly. This was back in the days before computerization. So the old pegboard system that said, Okay, you know, some folks with great hair, remember, finally. The way I found this investment wasn't exactly what the doctor thought I was going to do. I mean, I got, I got into the practice and he shoved the ledgers at me. Yeah. And I said, now we're going to approach this little differently. I'm going to think like this person's probably thinking, well, what I started doing was going through that. And taped underneath one of her drawers, they found her cheatbook.

Oh, my god. That's like mafia style. Well, a lot of ambassadors, you know, especially if they're, if they're carrying on for a long time, need to write down what they did. Yeah, he track of what's real and what's what's fiction. Yeah. And in those days, the, the cheatbook was like a notebook. Wow. Now it's more, more commonly, you know, an Excel spreadsheet on the computer. I like on the phone or something. Yeah, it was a book. So I found a cheatbook. And once I found that, a whole thing. I'm truly really fast. So one of the things I'm thinking right off the bat now that I've always wondered is when you actually help somebody discover that it is, in fact, happening.

How, I mean, how do they feel like what's, what's kind of the emotional is there a relief? Is it relief mixed with crap now? What? Or I mean, how does that, how does it work? In part, I think it depends on how suspicious they were. I mean, we get people who call us and say, I don't really have any particular reason to think I'm that risk. But the possibility of investment bothers me and I can like to know. Yeah. And when we, if we find investment in those situations, which happens sometimes, they're shocked. Yeah. And they've, you know, they've really been, been looking for reassurance that it's not happening. Yeah. And they have the people at the other end of the continuum who are pretty suspicious already. And, you know, they want to get an expert involved in it. And in those cases, Relief is probably the best emotion. What the two groups share though is is really a sense of violation.

This is not crime. like when somebody, your car's parked in a parking lot, somewhere, and somebody smashes up the window and takes a place. This is personal. This is done by somebody who you know really well, who's daughter's wedding, you are at three months ago, not really realizing that you were funding it.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's a sense of violation. Yeah. OK, so I want to still give some context around how you, you let into this and maybe just two minutes about prosperity then too, you've said before, and I think this is very true in this subject, and probably a few other financial subjects in general.

Sometimes people just don't want to know things, because it's hard news. You know, it's human nature. We kind of just like, you know, ignorance is bliss. So you work in that area. You work specifically just for dentist to catch this stuff. And it's an area where people don't want to know. So from that experience helping your friend to today, prosperity, you were just saying employees all over the country,

the biggest firm in the world, only dentist, kind of what bridge that transition, how did it get from there to where it is today? Well, you know, when I found the investment in my trans place, and he made that promise of dinner, I just kind of walked away. And I didn't give it another thought. OK, I certainly didn't see it. It was like a business idea for you. Oh, not at all.

I just, I was by the help of my friend. And I went back to thinking about my future, and then two weeks later, lightning struck. And the way lightning struck was that I was going into my own dentist's office for the first time. And think about how I felt and what was going through my mind. I had my hand on his front door, and I was going to go into the practice. And I looked through the glass panel on the front door.

And I saw sitting at his reception desk, the same woman who we fired, the other practice two weeks early. No, that is exactly what I said. What was it? Can I? Yeah, this point. Are you going to write a movie on this?

This is crazy. It was one of those weird things. So at that point, of course, I still wasn't thinking about a career, what I was thinking about was, how do I like this guy? I told this guy, yeah. So I turned around, and I hope you didn't see me. And I sprinted to a pay phone because in those days,

a cell phone was bigger than what you'd carry around. Yeah, that's true. And I called the office, and I didn't know a whole lot about how dental practice has worked. But I suspected if I put Dr. in front of my name, I get put through. Yeah. So I knew the name of a local orthodontist. And I just used his name.

And Dr. picked up the phone. And when he answered, I said, it's not Dr. Jensen. It's David Harris. I'm the guy who's supposed to be sitting in your chair right now. Let me tell you why I'm not. Oh my gosh, man. Well, that's just about word for word, what he said. And he asked me in a panic voice, why he should do.

And I started answering him. And he hired me. Yeah. And that was really where it became the business. And by the time I finished helping him, I had another call and another one after that. And it really just kept going. And did this pretty small scale for a long time?

And then what I mean, it was all you. You were the media leader. You were traveling. And in those days, it was typically done on site, which meant that you'd sneak into the premises after they closed. And you'd pull the all nighters and do your work. What revolutionized everything was the internet. And the ability to move data.

Because we reached a point about 14 years ago, when we didn't have to physically go into the office and in the market. And that changed the geographic scope from sort of what you could travel to easily to, yeah, I mean, our folks do some work in Australia, for example. And it's all done through the cloud. So that's really where the growth curve started

and where the business started to get bigger. OK. And then so today, if we fast forward a little bit, you've got, I've heard you say, and I want to get into how common this is. Because it's pretty mind-blowing. But you've got not only, I mean, these are very specialized business and people you have here.

This is only for debt just, not general medical, only in baslement investigations. But you have sub-specialties on your staff. Like you have people who are ortho, if that's only we do. And what happened there, orthodonic practice management software is quite different from general dental. You know, when you think about a lot of dental

specialties, they can comfortably use the same software as a general dentist. So pediatric dentist, periodonist, translates fine. Yeah. For the most part, I mean, there is specialized software for endo and periodo, but a lot of endodonist, for example, used general dental software. The two groups that are really outliers in terms of their software. And in the underlying business model,

are with the Donis neural surgeons. So originally, we had the same people who worked with general dentist try to cover those specialties. And it just didn't work for it. Yeah. I mean, I got a lot of complaining internally when I said to somebody, okay, I haven't ortho file for you next. So I don't got it.

Oh, God, I don't want to do it. Yeah, can you call the data? The data wasn't good enough. It wasn't. Now, you end up. And when you think about the orthodonic business model, the software records the income upfront, which makes sense to every orthodontist.

It makes no sense to anybody who's used to thinking about general dentistry where if you treat somebody over a two-year period, it's going to be income recognition as you go and not at kind of all upfront. Yeah. So we started hiring people with experience in those areas. The lady who heads our orthodepartment is just amazing. And she's got 25 years plus.

We also have some investigators who used to be dentists, and one of the investigators in our orthodepartment is actually orthodontist. Still practicing some of them? No, she's not of it. Medical condition that cost her trouble to practice. But the mind's very good. And she's certainly not happy sitting at home.

So she found us. Yeah, it's been a good success. Unfortunately, there will never be an end to the work that you guys can do as a company. I mean, it's not, it's just not going to tell us how common it is in bezel-ment in dental practice. I can't give you a definitive answer. And the reason I can't Ryan is that there are two

unquantifiables here. The first one is that there's some amount of investment that never gets detected. Yeah. Do you think that's large? Do you think that's a healthy, you're on experience with what we're talking about? I don't know.

I mean, it's just by its nature. It's unmeasurable. Yeah. And then there's a further amount that the doctor finds. And they just kind of sweep under the nearest carpet and don't tell anybody anywhere. So those two amounts stay out of this statistics. Based on what's reported.

And the most probably the most credible study is one that the American Dallas Association did about 10 years ago, but I don't think much has changed. And 35% of the dentists they had surveyed had been a bezel. So it was a big enough study that it's a safe assumption that those surveyed were on average at the midpoint in their careers.

So therefore if you double it, you've got the lifetime probability something else had any percent. Yeah. That's based on what was reported. You know, what we don't know is how many of the other 65% either had been a bezel that didn't know it or had been a bezel that chose not to disclose it.

Yeah. So you're, this is a question I've had, because I've seen this actually happened with clients that we've brought on and they had investment in the past. I've seen it where a doctor will, I don't know if it's bleeding hard, if it's like a mission of mercy, where the doctor will keep the person

try to rehab them, try to like get them back on the right path in life or whatever. Is that common? Where there's just, there's like this bleeding heart, like I want to fix the person's more common than it should be. And I guess there are a couple possibilities. You know, first of all, dentist and general have big hearts.

Right. And there are some of the most altruistic people I've ever met. A lot of charity were a lot of free community work. Yeah, definitely because they're a lot of identities. I tend to want to see the best in people.

And of course, I come from somewhere where we get exposed pretty routinely to the worse in people. And I don't quite have the same rose color glasses. Sure. The second possibility that I'll raise is that sometimes the doctor's been cutting corners himself for herself. Okay.

And they've kind of weakened their position. For example, if you're cheating on your income to access and your staff see that, yeah. You know, you've kind of leveled the playing field. Yeah. So sometimes it's something like that or, you know, that are to articulate the worst nightmare. You're having extra marital affair with the ambassador.

Okay, so they're pretty close to Bulletproof. You're saying this because you've seen it. Yeah. Yeah, I can. You're not making up scenarios here. So on that note, one of the things I was interested in when I have listened to some other interviews with you is you have a division in your company.

If I remember, you call it like the special cases division. It reminds me of some specifications. Yeah. So what's this, what's this special unit? How task force? Special investigations do the investigations that know none of our other people in the same moment would touch. So there are a couple of possibilities.

You know, one is it's some off beats off work. Okay. I mean, we in scene cases where Dr. Rought their own software. Okay. You know, and now they need the investigation. So we have nobody here familiar with it. We need somebody who's kind of adaptable. I mean, some of our investigators are really good at dentrix or eaglesoft or something,

but that's their comfort zone. And if you take them outside of it, they don't function well. Sure. The folks in SI, one of the distinguishing characteristics, they can sit down and, you know, foreign software and make it talk to them. Another situation is what we refer to internally as Fratricide. And what we're talking about there is a group practice where one doctor is stealing from another.

Oh, I felt, yeah, I've heard you say this in that. Fascinating to me. Which really boggles the mind. I does. A lot of dentists when I certainly when I speak to groups, you know, and I bring that topic up, the looks on some of their faces. Are there some uncomfortable shifting in the, yeah. Not so much that, but just, you know, that I understand how a staff member could do this.

Yeah, but a brother or sister dentist who has the same education I do in the same code of ethics. No way, but, you know, we, the number of active cases we have at any point in time, kind of varies between about 60 and 100. Okay. And typically four or five of those are Fratricide. Really? And when you think that it's a relatively small minority of dentists who practice in group practices. Yep.

That's a big representation. It's a factor. Yeah. And yeah, we've seen some, we've seen some spectacular. So, one of my questions. Braside. Well, I, so on this, on this note then, one of my questions, what I love to get to, probably has a few different parts to it is,

who's the typical in bezler? So let's just stay on this, this topic. Then if you're in a group practice, like what's the, what's the profile of a partner who's going to end up in bez, and bezling from his or her other partners? Which does seem kind of like, man, you would think everything aligns wire. We do in this to each other. Um, a lot of embezzlers. And, and if I, if I step backward and talk about embezzlers in general,

okay, yeah. They sort of come into flavors, which I'll call an EDM group. Okay. So, media thieves are stealing because their household can't pay for the necessities of life. Yeah. Desperation. Yeah. They, you know, there are two months behind in the render, their mortgage payment,

and they're about to get evicted. Oh, these ones smaller in, in terms of magnitude, usually in dollar amounts? Typically. Because they're stealing to fill a hole. They need 2500 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. And they still that.

And, and they feel bad about it Ryan, but they just don't see that they have a choice. Right. Yeah. And we've got the other group who I call greedy. And these people are stealing to scratch an inch in their ego, not their wallet. So, they think that society... isn't properly rewarding them for what they do and they're really stealing to address that. Get back at that.

So, you know, if I'm an office manager, I may look at my doctor as I've said in other interviews a high functioning moron with good hands. Yep. I've seen this attitude from staff in clients and it makes you wonder like, man, what do you treat the owner of the business so? It's so spared. So much. They, they, in their mind, the only reason the practice is successful is because they do a good

job of filling a chair and then collecting money from people who leave it. So they kind of deserve it. You know, they look at the doctor and they forget some things. I mean, they forget the years in school that that identified all the risk that it took to even. And the amount of student death that they came out with watching their friends go and, you know, get jobs out of undergrad and already have, you know, house. Cars and all that electric things are being grown up and they forget all that.

Yep. And the, the other thing is that most staff grossly overestimate how much the doctor takes home. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. They, they sort of tend to equate gross in that. Uh-huh. Yeah.

We collect an a billion bucks this guy must make a million dollars a year. And just, just, living in money. Oh, yeah. And, and they forget about overhead, even though they're part of it. Yep. To them, it all just seems really unfair. And they're stealing to take what they think somebody should give to them. Mm-hmm.

And when you, when you move that concept forward to fracturcy in a group practice, typically what you have as a doctor who thinks that he or she contributes more than everybody else. Yeah. Okay. And, and when you think about income sharing formulas in group practices, they're tricky. I mean, it's, it's difficult to come up with a formula that works under all sets of assumptions. Yeah.

And I've seen a lot of group practices where you have, let's say, two dentists, fractuses and together. And each of them has the perception that really they're the one floating the boat. Yeah. And they're, you know, they're, they're contributing more value than they're taking up. Yep. And you can't, you couldn't have it that, that both people were contributing a higher value than what they were taking out.

I mean, that's, if, if one's overpaid the other one must be under. Yeah. Um, you know, just like when you, when you serve a hundred people and 80 of them say they're above average, yeah, those are always logistics surveys. Yeah. So you have a perception by this person that, that perhaps the income formula that, you know, made all kinds of sense when they agreed to attend years ago, it is unfair now. Yeah.

Or something like that. And they're, they're taking what they think they should have given bit. They should receive. So they, so would you say that, the, um, these partnerships that, where this happens, it's more, they fall into the greedy category. Yeah. For the time they develop that kind of sense of time. Not a lot of dentists are, are two months behind in their mortgage.

Yeah. And that risked it. And, you know, most most can at least provide for the necessities of life. It's the, it's the stuff beyond that where sometimes it's a struggle. So, no, it's, as you say, they're, they're the greedy thieves, not the needy ones. Okay. So while we're on the topic, then of the, the general personality or characteristics of an ambassador, um, can someone, I mean, can you, how do you watch out for it?

Is it, something you could spot during interview process or, you know, are there warning signs, red flags or on the greedy side, maybe? Or even in the needy side, is it, is it's developing in someone's practice? Yeah. There are, um, you know, there are certainly external red flags. If we're, if we're talking about needy thieves, um, you know, there will be phone calls to the office from collection agencies. Okay.

Are maybe a girl in a she or a, where the doctor has to set aside some of that employee's wage and pay it to, you know, some third party. I mean, sometimes there's stuff like that. A lot of, a lot of people who have money issues are a little bit communicative about it or, yeah, you know, you'll, you'll see them make some choices like, you know, the whole office is going out for lunch, but they say, you know, I'll just, you know, I brought a lunch, I'll just stay here. Okay.

You know, so, so, one way or another, if, if somebody has money trouble, um, the oddies, we should have some sense of it. Is it ever preceded by maybe a life event that you as an owner are aware of? Like, there's a divorce or a bankrupt, so you're a job loss or illness and then, you know, hindsight's everything. Think of her, you say, you know, everything's clear in hindsight, but I mean, can you, can you know any of this beforehand? You, you nailed the big four.

Um, you know, most of, most of those things would be known to the dentist. I mean, it's, it's, it's very, it would be very, a typical that a staff member is going through divorce and the practice owner doesn't know that. Right. Yeah. Um, and we can all understand the mathematics of divorce, you know, you used to have two income supporting one household. And now you have two income supporting two households in a bunch of attorney bills.

Yep. Um, you know, that, that, that strains anybody's finances. Mm-hmm. So is it, I mean, should it, is it on the dentist then the owner to just start being more aware of, um, someone's role and responsibilities in control that they have over things when they go through things and not, I think what's hard is we don't want to see the worst in someone. We don't want to suspect things of people and maybe we avoid doing what we should because

we don't want to offend or we don't want to make someone feel like we don't trust them anymore. But should a dentist maybe do something different when they notice an employee or staff member is going through something like that? Other than taking note of it and being aware of other possible manifestations that come out at the same time, no, you know, the, lots of people get divorced. It doesn't mean they're stealing. Right.

Yeah. But when somebody's going through divorce and they suddenly start staying late at the practice and they don't want to take vacation. And they tell the doctor that, no, you, you don't need to upgrade that practice management software because the version that we have now is just fine. You know, when you, when you start seeing a conflicts of symptoms, okay. That's, that's when the rain already needs to go off. So, yeah, work at work habits and work attitudes start changing a little bit.

I don't want to, let's not bring in the consultant. I don't want them to come in today or I don't want to talk to your CPA or you don't mean that that expensive consultant, you know, we have all the expertise you need right here. We can do it. You mentioned trust a minute ago and the way that humans handle trust is kind of interesting. When you first meet somebody, you kind of, you know,

size them up and you decide are they trustworthy? Yeah. And once you decide that, you kind of lock it away in a box and you don't revisit that. That's what it is. You decided it. Yeah. It's not, it's not, we as humans are not particularly good at saying, okay, I trusted that when I hired them five years ago, they were trustworthy, but you know, something's changed. Yeah. And I need to revisit that question. Okay. The first thing a lot of people who call me say is I trust my staff or I trust my bookkeeper or I trust whoever. And I want to say to them, okay, but is that a, is that a decision that you re validated yesterday or is that one that you made 10 years ago? I'm just, and just have an open up again.

Yeah. Well, I think you, I've heard you use the phrase when you're talking about the nature of investment abroad as interactive and adaptive. And that's probably what you're kind of touching on is these things, they evolve and they change. And you know, what the relationship was 10 years ago isn't the same as it is today. That's true. What I, what I'm really getting at with with the adaptation or the evolution of is I have a little frustration with what a lot of people have been told to do about investment. Okay. Some misconceptions about, you know, to be handled or something. And the classic advice that's given to people is get more involved in your numbers. Okay. And I'll never say that's a bad idea. Sure. Yes. It's a really good idea.

You're doing that anyway, probably. Some level. What I would say instead though is get more involved in your people.

The basic problem with numbers is this. Every ambassador, when they decide they're going to start to see all the first exercise they go through is they study their environment. And their environment is largely the dentist. Yeah. So what does this person look at at the end of each day? What did they look at each month? Do they reconcile the bank against the practice management software or not? Is there a third party doing that or is nobody doing it? And does the doctor ever print their own reports from the software? Do they simply rely on ones that I've written? Okay. And

you know, when the who takes the money to the bank? And if a staff member takes it to the bank, is there any kind of reconciliation after? These are the questions and the best are asked. And they know, but they see this day today. There's no one who knows the doctor better than the staff that's there every single day. And they all need to think about this problem. While the doctors trying to maintain their kind of a lot of put in and yeah, coincidentally spend a few minutes each day running the crime. Yeah. It's a very unequal battle. And what the ambassador will do is come up with a plan based on the doctor's patterns. And I'll give you an example. And there was one female dentist to read all it. And she had an activity where there are kids on ears and nights that her husband

could not drive them to. So she had to be out of the office at five o'clock on Thursdays. And what the enterprise ambassador did was kind of save up all the emergencies that came in Tuesdays and Wednesdays and put them into the doctor's book on Thursdays. Yeah. Step one, make the doctor very busy, make her run like she. Yeah. So that Thursday at five, you know, she was spreading to her car peeling off her yeah practice clothes that she went. And the last thing she'd be thinking about is day sheets and yeah, I've got it still. So the practice was closed on Fridays. And really the first chance the doctor would have to look at Thursdays reports was on Monday. When let's face it, what happened on Thursdays is pretty distant memory. Yep. So the stealing happened on Thursdays

and again, it was all well engineered to do it in a way that it was least likely to be scrutinized. Yep. So that's what I mean about adaptive. And the other thing is of course that if I work for you and you change your behavior somehow, that's not going to make my need for money go away. Mm-hmm. So let's say for example that I am stealing the sofa, I'm taking the bank to positive to the bank and I'm stealing my name. And one day you come into the practice and you've been on some course on the week and you've read an article and you say, you know what, I think I'm going to start taking the deposit to the bank, listen. Yeah. That does not send me to join the church choir.

I have to rethink. You'll just find it. It's water. You'll just find the path of least resistance. He'll just find another way to go. I need another path. I'm not sure. Yeah. So that's the downfall of the folks who say, you know, here are five things or two things or whatever that you need to do in your practice to prevent an investment. There's no prevention. Yeah. There's forcing your embezzles to go in in a different way. Okay. So that I would you say out of all the misconceptions there are about embezzlement that that there is prevention that you can prevent a criminal from being a criminal. That's not it's it's not true. You would have to get inside their mind. Yeah. Yeah. Change who they are fundamentally. And in a way that we always we could. Yeah. And

you know, when I when I talked to live audiences, I say, okay, I want you to think back to the last time that a staff member was doing something in constant March all day. No, you just couldn't get them to stop. You know, everybody's got a review in the microwave on on lunch break. Yeah. So they're just getting to put it in. So I start. So you couldn't get them to stop that. Yeah. How do you think they're going to? Which really was in consequential. Now they're stealing which really benefits them. You know, do you think that there's any possible way that you can, you know, sort of touch them with a motivation stick in a way that they will not want to steal from you anymore? Not a chance. Yeah. Okay. So on that thread, then there's this concept of there is no prevention. You can't

change people by putting in some safeguard or something. And what you said earlier, it's not don't just get involved in your numbers, get involved in your people, be in your people's lives. How do those things coordinate? And there is no prevention and be more involved with your people. Well, or after here is early detection. Okay. On average, Jim Bezlin that goes on for about two years before somebody realized. And what about magnitude? We are. Something we said this year, what's the average magnitude that we're talking about? I haven't seen any global numbers across the industry.

The only numbers that you give you are internal ones. And the last time we looked at which was about three or four years ago, the average amount that a few stole to the point where they got caught was just over $100,000. And so on. So a lot of money. And we, in this conversation,

understand the time value of money, and certainly if that happens to young dentists, yeah, what that takes out of the retirement of the state is massive. Yeah, not to mention the ones that you've seen a lot of, I've seen a handful of where it's half a million, 400 grand, 600 grand. Yeah, we have a part of our website called the Hall of Shame

where we're talking about. That's I think how I found you one day years ago, I'm like, what is this? It's the Hall of Shame. And we have a subset of the Hall of Shame, called a million dollar club. Oh, my gosh. How big is it?

I think it's nine people now. My goodness. That's like, that's devastatingly. That's life-changing future changing. Of course it is. And then there's a little bit less experience of half a million dollar club. It's kind of about 20 members.

That's just huge. This scary thing about the Hall of Shame is what's not on. In other words, the only investor is where there are people who have already under the public domain somewhere else anyway. We never. Yeah.

We never publicize an investment. It's not somebody's an insurance criminal. OK. So for every investor in the Hall of Shame and there are a number of others who should be in art. Yeah, they're not, they're not Charizard not caught. OK. So back to what you were saying, then there's not necessarily

prevention, but there's detection. And there's being involved in people's lives. So what are some of those things that you would suggest for people? Well, there's a fairly lengthy list of behaviors that are correlated with investment. And I'll say something I said a minute ago. The fact that somebody's going through the course

doesn't automatically mean their own design. Yeah. What it means is that they have a vulnerability. And you need a couple of other ingredients before investment is really possible. So to be stolen from you need three things. Somebody needs to be under some kind of pressure. And it could be financial in the case of the need.

And these are emotional for the greedy one. They also need the opportunity to steal. And that's not when we have to talk about a lot, because that opportunity is there for basically everybody in a practice. Yeah. Front office more so than back office, but everybody has an opportunity.

And in multiple ways, which we won't go into. But yeah. And then the third thing they need is rationalization. We've all been taught since we were two or three years old. You don't take other people's stuff. Yeah. That was ingrained in all of us from an R.A. So we all know that it's wrong.

What rationalization means is when somebody gets to the point where they say, it's OK to do what I know is wrong because. Because I've heard behavior scientists say, over and over again, that we are the best storytellers to ourselves. We can rationalize anything. Well, and certainly when you look at people who are so sociopathic, their ability is to construct their own truth

and then believe that it is true. The science of polygraph and lighting deckers, which is now largely discredited one of the big reasons, is it just doesn't work on so sociopaths? It's crazy. The belief is stuff they're telling them. Yeah. It works on people when they know they're lying and lying bothers.

When people can construct their own reality and then buy into it, there's no physiological response to saying the lies because in the sociopaths, mind their truth. Yeah. So yeah, as you progress down the ladder of sociopathy, then people find it easier and easier to rationalize. So I think there's a lot of misconceptions too about false sense of security with, like I have a CPA or I have a bookkeeper

or I have a financial planner or who are the people that can actually help with this stuff in the detection, as you say, are getting involved in the people's lives? A lot of people think that their CPA is really on the front line of their defense against the bezel. Yeah. The American Dell Association did a kind of interesting survey about 10 years ago.

And what they did was they asked him bezel and victims. What tip do you want? So glad you brought this up. I was going to ask you about that. Yeah, how did they find it? Yeah. How did they find it? And the answer, my account and found it,

came up 4% of the time. 4% of the time, accountants found the embezzlement. And to almost every account that I've ever met, what happens in a doctor's practice management and software is kind of a black box. Sure. They're really robust nowadays. I mean, what accounts do is they take totals

from the practice management software and those become the start of the accounting process. Yep. But to understand what went into that number is beyond their expertise and to be fair also beyond their mandate. Yeah. And that's where most of the bodies are buried in embezzlement and dental practices.

Most embezzlement is found by luck. OK. All of the systems that are put in place don't perform as well as luck. So luck, you mean, I'm sure you've seen the dozens of lucky examples. Since that's the majority of the reason where they find them.

Oh, what are some examples? One that I did share early in my career. What happened was the embezzlement broke or like scheme on the weekend. So one day, she wasn't into practice. And the phone calls that she normally would have a field and went to somebody else. And they were per change.

That person shortly after lunch came into the doctor and said, there's something strange going on here. Because I've gotten three of these very weird phone calls this morning. And they just don't make sense. And that was what I'm fully the whole thing. Yeah. So luck is luck is in or even be obviously. It's not something that we can play to plan, plan for anything else.

But that just points to the ineffectiveness of most of the approaches that people take. OK. The other thing I hear a lot from doctors is, well, I check my day and report every day. And I make darn sure that it balances my bank deposit. Yeah, those are one of those check. listening to you get it a seminar or a blog post or something. Yeah. Good things to do. Yeah. It is. It is really, really good advice to check your day and report. But if it matches to the bank deposit, that means only one thing. It means whoever's holding on to the money knows how to add.

That's a lot to use a phrase that's topical these days of fake news in reports from practice management. Yeah. Like you said, everything that we're, I like when you say where the bodies are very, that's a very fun accounting. It's very mafia. But all the, all the, all the bodies have been buried way before that final numbers tally and they know, I mean, obviously they know that they know how to, but even if you look at your day and report. I'm not going to discuss specifics here because there's probably somebody listening to this podcast for all the wrong reasons. Mark. Yeah. And I'm not going to help them. Yeah. But it's not that hard to make a day and report life. And the fact that it equates to the bank deposit doesn't mean anything other than as I say that somebody's somebody's got the basics of math figured out. Okay. So one other thing I, you know, I think about sometimes when I went through this exercise, I had one of our clients hire you guys not not too long ago. And one thing I was thinking about the whole time is if there's something found. What's I mean, is there ever recourse on this stuff this things happen to the ambassadors that they get money back. I mean, how often is that even they get, you know, compensated for this.

Everybody gets something back. And how much you get back is is a function of a couple of months. First of all, most most animal practices have some amount of insurance for this. And it's it's a fairly modest amount typically. I mean, the number we we see almost all these is 25 dollars in coverage. Can that be, man, this is something like I haven't thought through in terms of higher levels of insurance. Can that be increased? Can that be self-insured? I mean, absolutely, if you go back to your insurance company and you ask them for a higher coverage limit, most of them will go to 75,000 dollars pretty quick. It's a constant loss. Okay. So for your listeners, that's a really good idea. First of all, check how much coverage you have. Who do they call who's the tip of who's this is a popular insurance. So it's the, it's you know, you know, you know, you're in sure there's been against fires and floods and things. So this would be a tip, no brainer tip, no matter what, just make sure you have the maximum coverage that some of that your current company's going to give you for this issue. It's a little bit anger. You know, it's it's not big dollars typically to increase that. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of recovery, that's the long thing through. Here's my takeaway from, as I was telling you before, I've been listening to some of your other interviews. So some surprising takeaway from me.

Even though I've seen this happening, clients lives unfortunately is, it's not preventable. And you can't deter someone who's bent on stealing from stealing. So not preventable. It's discovered mostly through dumb luck most often. It's not because you have a CPA or consultant or something. It's just dumb luck. It's happening way more than I thought it was. I mean, if we can kind of see from statistics recorded that we're in that, you know, a third of all dentists and it's probably twice that would give in the, the part of career and then all the unreported stuff. I mean, it's a very probable thing and a dentist live if you work for 30 plus years. Well, when we work, it's done stealthily, which means that the, the thief will have no idea whatsoever that they're being helped. You don't show up in a black van with a team of eight people and yeah. So when we work, our, our total process should take eight to ten weeks for a practice. You know, if investment is happening, we're likely to find it much more quickly than that. Okay, you know, it's eight to ten weeks till the point where we issue a report.

And as I say, 100% stealthy. So there's no chance that the, that the investor will realize that we're on the job. Okay, so I imagine in my head that there's like, is it feels like such a crisis when you do, you start to suspect you have, is that the way people, they just pick up the phone and call you, the issue to message. What's the, I mean, do you have the, the hotline that people call into. We have a lot of ways to reach us. The easiest way probably is to our website, which once you hear it, you'll remember it's triple w dot dental investment dot com. Okay, and the only trick there is spelling and bells on that correctly. Okay, there. Google can help you if you, if you, if you spell it wrong, you know, in Google search, it'll, it'll tie that I get you there. Okay. There are also welcome to call our 12 free line, which is 888 83982327. Great. And when they come on our website, there's a, there's a chat feature there. You know, it's, it's manned about 12 hours a day.

So if, you know, somebody goes on the website, they want to talk to a life person that can easily start it there. And if somebody's available, normally the chat operator will move it fairly quickly to a phone call or, you know, at least schedule a time when when a phone call can happen. Okay. So that's, that's probably the best way or call us. Yeah, I was, we were talking about this earlier, but it's kind of one of those things that if you do suspect, it's kind of like I took my puppy to the vet over the weekend and spent about a thousand bucks and it turns out nothing's wrong. And it is nice to spend the money to hear that there was no problems. And I feel the same way when I go to my dentist to, I had a client go through the same thing with your company, spend some money, had the stealthy investigation done, turned out that it was other problems that was causing the financial pain.

And that was a huge relief, you know, it was good to just know that that wasn't an issue. So I imagine that's, you know, that's an outcome too. But that's still to me as a consumer of services, it's still worth paying for things to know that nothing's wrong. Nobody gets upset when they buy fire insurance for a year and their house doesn't burn. And I don't use it. Yeah, life insurance. Same way. Nobody's mad at that. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Well, David, man, I'm really glad we had you on today. Thank you for taking the time. I feel like this is super helpful information for our audience.

And like, as you've been saying, and I'm surprised at how common this is, what a, you know, what a problem this actually is. So thanks for your expertise and your time and your information and thanks for being here. We'll do this again another time. I love to. All right. Thanks, everybody. Cari on. My many thanks again to my new friend David Harris from Prosperident. That was a wild and informative and a little scared. of a conversation. We're so glad that you made the time and we had them on the show. A reminder to go check out our free Facebook group where you can post questions

and jump into conversations and add questions for upcoming Q&A shows for the Dennis Money Show. Go to DennisAdvizer.com slash group for our free Facebook group. And if you want to chat with us, go to our website, book a free consultation. We have a wide open calendar for you. DennisAdvizer.com. Click on Book Free Consultation or just shoot us a text or call us A33DDS Plan. Again, thanks to David Harris of Prosperident. Thanks everyone for listening. Carry on.