What you REALLY want to know about embezzlement in dental practices

Auto-generated transcript: What you REALLY want to know about embezzlement in dental practices -- David Harris interviewed by Dr. Glenn Vo

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It's called the Nifty Deals. This is where we spotlight a particular deal that we negotiated for you, the dental professional. So sit back, relax, listen to all the awesome info and get ready to get hooked up with the Nifty deal. Hey, what's up everyone? It's Dr. Glenn Vowe and thank you so much for tuning in because today this morning I have a very special guest. David Harris. He is the dentist's investment expert himself. David, thank you so much for jumping on today. Hey, it's great to be here.

You know, your company is called Prospera Dint. And you're like that resident expert when it comes to investment. Just one of those words that we don't want to say and we don't want to think about. It's almost like it's probably as bad as PPO, probably worse than PPO sometimes. But David, let's start with this for those who, and I've been following you and I've been using your resources and I'm always learning something. But for those who do not know what you do, right? And I've already kind of spilled the beans in the beginning. But for those who don't know who you are and what you do, they've just really briefly talk about what you and your company do for the dental industry. Absolutely. We do two things.

We investigate when a dentist thinks that somebody is stealing from him or her. So typically it's a staff member, but it could be, it could be somebody like a bookkeeper, you know, an external bookkeeper accountant or what happens probably more than people want to think about is you have several doctors in the group practice. And one of them is is getting paid more than they should. And coincidentally, it's typically the one who handles the finances. Yeah, I mean, it's just some of the, some of the case studies that you have that you have posted have been like jaw dropping and eye opening. But for those who are watching right now, if you have any questions, there's two ways you can do this. You can post it in the comments and I'll read it to David or you can message to me. If you, if you actually have, if you're in like a situation and you're like, okay, I don't want people know what's going on. I can message to me, I'm have my other screen up and I'll feel those questions to David, but man, we're going to dive right into this David, let's let's shock some people because you've shocked me when I've watched some of your webinars. Let's just shock some people let's let's throw out talk about some of the, some of the case studies that you've presented in the, in the past and let's just go over let's start with the ones that that to this day still have you drop in your draw.

What a job, what do you talk about it. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about some some cases there. So, you know, cases can be noteworthy here for a lot of reasons. Of course, the big one is dollars. Yeah, the biggest and bezel man I've ever seen in a dental practice was about two million dollars. Two million dollars. We have a, we have part of our website called the Hall of Shame and I, I think you, you spend a little bit of time there. This is part where we profiling bezelers and we have about six hundred and eighty of them profile. And we have this part of our Hall of Shame. We call the million dollar club. So that's people who have more than a million dollars from their practice and they're about seven of them.

And then we have the half million dollar club, which is quite as exclusive but has as pretty plus of its members. You know, the average amount that if these steals to the point where they get caught from a dentist is about a hundred thousand dollars. That's what average. Wow. And let's talk about that. Let's talk about the Hall of Shame, right? That two million dollar. I mean, I'm just, I'm just wrapping, I'm just wrapping that around, I'm wrapping my mind around it. But let's talk about that particular case. Was it was it was the office manager? Was it the financial coordinator? Whatever you can can share, talk about that and how did they end up in bezeling two million dollars? Well, first of all, it doesn't happen in a weekend. You know, that, that happens over a protracted period of time.

The typical large dollar thief is somebody who's already been with the practice for a long time before they start stealing. And normally the office manager, you know, this person enjoys the doctor's trust. The doctor involved tends to be somebody who's very clinically focused and very hands-off in terms of the money part of the practice. And you know, that's a recurring factor in most big thefts. A lot of the people who get hit by big dollars are really high achieving dentists. You know, they're, they're multi-skilled people who, you know, do a lot of full-moth reconstruction and implants and stuff like that. And if, you know, if you're practicing at that level, it's pretty all consuming. And you need to spend a lot of energy on, you know, building and then maintaining your knowledge base and kind of complex interactions with patients because obviously the way you

the way you talk to a patient who's contemplating spending $80,000 on a full-moth job is a little bit different than the conversation you have in the opportunity with somebody who might need a crown. Right. They tend to be clinical high achievers and what they give up typically to get there is some some level oversight on the practice finances. Yeah, because they're probably delegating, they're focusing on what they're really good at and they're delegating in their. trusting some team members and they're like, okay, I'm gonna let them handle it. And I'm just gonna, I'm just focused on producing a lot. And also, I guess with those type of practices,

they're producing so much, they're bringing so much money in. And when you bring in that much money in, it's kind of easy to kind of tuck up these things here and there, right David? It's a lot harder to steal from a struggling dentist than it is from one who's financially comfortable. And if your audience thinks back to

when they started practice right out of school, they had big student dad and, they were probably at that point watching their pennies pretty carefully. Fiber 10 years later, people have gotten some distance from the wolves that were chasing them before and they'll go more relaxed financially. And that's kind of the point where you can be a little more vulnerable.

Yeah, absolutely. Guys, for those who are tuning in just now, see a bunch of people jumping on, if you have any questions for David, type it in the comments section, I'll post it for David. And then also, message me privately. If you're going through something

or maybe you just don't want anyone to know what you're asking the question, message it to me, I'll post it on there. But David is the expert on investment and dentistry. And I will tell you this, the man is very busy unfortunately, right? Because again, that means that's just a lot of stuff going on. But what that means is,

is that this happens a lot more often than you realize. And David, let me ask you this, just a general question, would your clients that you've worked with are most of them? What percentage of them are actually generally surprised that like this is going on?

Or do most people kind of when they come reach out to you, they kind of have a suspicion? Yeah, the problem tends to be people not acting on what their gut tells them they should. Or so then people overreacting. So most, a lot of dentists, they get that a sort of initial moment of worry. And they just kind of push it to the side somewhere.

And sort of turn off that little voice that's speaking with them. And so I would say most of the victims we work with aren't surprised. The people who are surprised are the ones who kind of catch somebody right handed, which plan most times happens by accident. Yeah, most, other than what we find,

most in bezel men is found by some kind of chance of current. So I'll give you an example. Fairly early in my career, I was working with a two-periodonus practice. And they had an office manager who never missed a day in anybody's memory. And then one day she broke her leg skiing. And Monday morning for the first time in anybody's memory,

she was not in the practice. And around 11 o'clock in the morning, one of the receptionists came into the senior doctor's opportunity, pulled him out of the opportunity and said, I've gotten three of these very weird phone calls this morning. And I just don't know what to make of it. And she told the doctor what the phone calls were about.

And they were all about people whose payments were wrong. They've gotten a statement in what they got was not what they had paid. And when she got the third call, she went in and saw the doctor. And he listened to her for a few minutes. And then he called me. And the whole thing on Rally from there is about $600,000.

Really. But it all came to light. Because if the office manager had been there that money more, he was like, she was every other money more. When those patients called about their accounts, they would get put through to her. And she would just give them whatever reassurance they needed to know that this was just a little goof.

But your balance is right. And that's all you need to know. Wow. And it was that freak occurrence of breaking her leg. Wow, that meant she wasn't in the office, that meant that the whole thing unraveled. Well, what I mean, lucky for the doctor, because honestly, that didn't happen, how much longer.

And this particular case, how long had she been in bezeling for? Well, she'd been there for about 20 years and had been in bezeling for probably the last four. Wow. And you're absolutely right. This could have gone on. I mean, she was there for 20 years.

I mean, she could have gone on for 10 months. Long, right? That's right. Wow. Because the systems that dentists think will catch this. And when I ask you, and it's like, what's your front line of defense against the embezzlement?

Their answer typically is, well, my CPA, of course. Yeah. And CPA's almost never find embezzlement in dental practices for a whole bunch of reasons. One is they don't have that mandate. They also don't have the training or the expertise that they would need. And typically, the way that practices do their accounting,

the CPAs can do their work from your bank accounts. And they don't really even need to look at your practice management software. So a rage is stuff can be happening in your software. And it's just not visible to your accountants. Well, David, I think you just hit a nerve because now I just had a whole influx of questions here. So we can talk to our two of you

who are suddenly mad. Can we take some questions right now? I'd love to. OK, so let me first of all, you do have a fan in the audience. Bravo, David. Thanks for the good work you're doing. And yes, I am so happy to have David on. And guys, if you like what you're hearing,

type in the comments section. David, show them some love, show us some love there. But let's get that question there. And it's a long one. So bear with me, I'll read it to you. Is it a red flag when a new front office person comes in? claims that she and her husband have plenty of money. And she just does this job because of she's passionate

about dentistry. Her clothing, the way she dresses does not look like she had a plenty of money either. So she doesn't fit that bill there. But is it a red flag? That's owners wondering. They're just doing this because they just love doing it in, and it's not all about the money.

That's a great question. And the problem here is this statement could be absolutely true. or it could be designed to make the dentist relax and think that, you know, this is somebody who's unlikely to make a grab for the doctor's wallet. Yeah. The thing about assessing your risk for a investment or dealing with somebody like this person in the practice is that you have to kind of take a more holistic look. And we can't just overreact to one phenomena.

In other words, if this same person also refuses to take vacation and is really possessive about or do-do-do-do-do-do works-based and doesn't want to cross train anybody else to do your job. You know, if we start seeing three or four risk factors, then I get concerned. What I always tell people, I mentioned vacation, you know, one symptom. And you could see the-you can guess with the period on office that I talked about, that the office manager never took vacation either. So that's a very clear red flag, but let me tell you a story. My dad's in attorney. He's 87 years old right now.

And he practiced till he was 85. In the last seven or eight years that he practiced law, he never took a vacation. I'm pretty sure he wasn't in baselling from his law firm. Really, I suppose. My mom who has since passed away was not in great health and couldn't travel. So in my dad's mind, if I take time off, I'm stuck at home 24 or seven. And he and my mom kind of built their marriage around limiting the amount of time that they spent together. And he wasn't just going to- he just wasn't going to force the envelope. So I'll agree with the person who asked the question that potentially it's red flag,

but it would be better to look a little more broadly at behavior and see if there are other factors. Because it's quite possible to overreact to one thing. And that person Glenn is more than welcome to reach out to me after this. And I'll kind of have a conversation with him or her about what they're seeing and help them put it into context. Well, we have another question here and actually for this doc, I'm just going to apologize ahead of time. I know some of you guys have some questions ahead, but this one kind of ties in. So if it ties into something, I'm going to just ask it next. I will get to your questions, I promise, and I'm getting a whole bunch of messages right now.

But this question is kind of very similar. What if a team member is all this and comes in with a lot of extra money, all of the sudden, right? Like they, they didn't win the lottery, but all the sudden they're doing really good. Just out of the blue, is that a red flag? I'll give exactly the same answer. It could be. But at the same time, there are all kinds of legitimate reasons why that could happen. I mean, maybe they're on died and left there's money. And that could be just sticky situation when you kind of maybe accuse someone without any basis or maybe then you're going in.

Then I'll have to bring someone from Cedar Solutions to talk about HR. Okay, when you're doing that, you're suddenly in Paul Edwards, turf, but exactly. But again, that does sometimes it's you wonder, right? Like all of a sudden they've got a new car and they're moving to new, how they're doing all this. I mean, I can see where people can be concerned about. And again, what would you're advice me in that situation when it's like now you're wondering. My advice would be exactly the same. We need to look at this person a little more broadly and see what other behavioral markers for imbezzlement they're exhibiting.

We actually have a questionnaire that we saw on our website. It's not very expensive. It's called the imbezzlement risk assessment questionnaire. And what it does is it asks people about 40 questions. So, you know, it's a little broader than simply picking out one factor in saying, well, that's a risk factor for imbezzlement. So, you know, it's a, it's a scored questionnaire, which means that, you know, we can kind of compare how you do with how your peers do. And that gives us a pretty good idea of what level of risk you face. So we all, we got to comment in the comments section.

This is going to lead into the next question I got from from message. And that is, what, hold on, that we already, we already got that one. That's okay. I love that one. I'll watch that. Okay, here it is. So never think this could happen to you. Set systems to be preventative that, that what you recommend. So this, that this ties into the question I got here privately. And that is, well, what are some of the things that I can do?

What are that, what can I do to make sure that I'm not getting robbed of the line by the people I trust in my practice? Yeah, that's a, both great questions. So let's talk about what you can do. And I'm going to give your audience maybe a little bit of bad news. There's no prevention here. I mean, thieves are infinitely creative. They, they know the doctor. They work for very well. They know what you look at and what you don't look at.

And they will build an investment system that navigates around your scrutiny. So, you know, when, when doctors ask me, well, how do I absolutely positively make sure I don't get a bezel? I don't get embezzled. My answer is really simple. Put your hand piece down. Walk out the front door, walk it and don't come back. You know, but that seems a little extreme and you just get a word about your kids. Take it some money out of your wallet. Yeah, I'm, I'm familiar with that concept. But let's talk about what you can do.

And the first thing's really basic. Here's how thieves think. There are two kinds of dentists out there. There are those who know how much money should be going into the bank today. And there are those who don't know that. If you are in the second category, which really means that you don't review the reports that your practice management software creates, then if, if I'm working for you and I want to steal, you've made it incredibly easy for me because all I have to do is divert some of the deposit. In other words, if the amount of money that really should be going into your bank account today is $10,200, but either I'm making the deposit or you're making it, but you don't know how much it's supposed to be.

And if I can give you 9,600 in the, you, you walk with that to the bank. That's exactly what I'm going to do. And it's uncomplicated and, you know what, the dumbest thief on the planet can pull that one off. Yeah. So the first thing is, and, you know, I know exactly what your audience is saying, you know, I didn't go to dentists at the end of the account. Well, you know, you're right, but this isn't going away. The first thing that every dentist needs to do every day is look at reports from their practice

management software. And I'm going to take a one-step further. If you allow a staff member to print those reports and hand them to you, you really don't have any control over the parameters of the reports.

And that makes it easy for me to hide stuff. So you have to look at the reports. You also have to print them yourself. So let's start there. Now, if you're doing that part, if you're checking how much money goes in the bank versus how much entry-extere equals off to whatever you're using, says should go in the bank. Automatically, you've ruled out the the dumbest portal of thieves.

And you've made the act of stealing a lot more complicated because now what somebody needs to do is they need to teach your practice management software how to lie. Yeah. And that's certainly can be done. I'm not going to get into specifics here because we don't want to give, we don't want to give some stuff. You know, they probably in a bezzler in the audience somewhere looking for nuggets here. And I'm not going to be the one to feed them. Yeah. But the trick is then to teach the software to misrepresent how much money came in. Which is a lot more demanding. And ultimately gives a lot more chance to be in caught. So, you know, that's the first thing I'll say. Yeah. And you know, just listening to what you're talking about. It's just like if you want to secure

your home, right? You make it, you make it harder for someone to break in. Maybe you, you have an alarm system. Maybe you have a little like stand in the front, this is, it's protected by someone. So, yeah, especially in Texas, Glenn, where you live is the national rifle association like, remember to put that on the front door. Yeah, you can do that. I mean, you know, how you do things and but at the end of the day, if someone wants to break into your house, they're going to you can make it harder, but they're going to do it. It sounds, and it sounds very similar to what you're saying here. It's like, you can make it harder. But again, people can, you know, people are smart and people can figure out ways. And it's just, what you're saying is, it's just,

you know, you've got to, you've got to touch your gut feeling and the also I need to know the resources, like, like, your company that can help out here. And I got Dr. Chris Phillips here. Oh, Dr. Chris Phillips, uh, given you a shout out here, having personally used David's service in my practice, I can't say enough good things about them, highly recommend them. And Dr. Phillips, that's the reason why David's on and thank you so much for the shout out and guys, if you're for those of watching, if you like what you're hearing, type in the comment section David there. But yeah, Dr. Phillips has used you. Yeah, thank you, thank you, Chris. And if your audience members don't know Chris or don't know who he is, they really should. Yeah, he's he's

got a lot of interesting ideas about dentistry. And he really has has the ability to help people with with some some marketing type issues. So, so David, I want to let's talk about the awkward situation, right? So obviously for those who are listening right now, they're probably thinking, well, you know, it might be worth it just to have David just kind of doing once over and just see who knows, right? Who knows, right? How does that process actually work? Like, I mean, you know, obviously, I'm assuming you don't tell your team that there's someone a third party coming in to you keep it quiet or and who's supposed to know is it just the practice owner and and here's another awkward one. Do you let the spouse know if your spouse is working

there too? I'll take the second one first. When we do see some cases of spouse is stealing from doctors. Usually, Glenn, it's an anti-seedant to divorce. So she's about to leave you and she just hasn't told you that yet. And her attorney or somebody has said, you know, you need to put some money under the mattress because when you when you tell your husband Dennis that you're divorcing him, he'll take you off the payroll and you got to buy groceries. So we do see spouse on investment. You know, certainly if your spouse is among the suspects, then you don't want to tell him or her that that we're involved. But to answer your first question, our methodology which we worked out over a lot of years is designed to make it so that nobody but the doctor knows that

we're involved. So first of all, we don't do this on site because, you know, I just could not stick one of my geeky accounts looking investigators in your practice for four days and sustain the argument that they're their effects that compressor. We also don't repeatedly connect into your practice management software remotely because there's a good chance somebody will will notice that. What we do actually is we get a copy of the data files in your software and then my IT guys who are tremendously talented build what we call a forensic duplicate. The dental comparable really would be a study model. We build a forensic duplicate of your software. So if you're using let's say open dental, we copy your data files in our computer lab. We build a copy of open dental with your data.

And then all of our investigation is done using the clone instead of the life stuff.

Wow, it's fairly high tech and what it does is it first of all keeps that firewall between us and your staff. And secondly, it allows us the luxury of working with static data. In other words, as an investigator, if I'm looking at something on a Tuesday and I put it down and I pick it back up on Thursday, I want everything to be exactly where I left it, which I will have with the clone copy that we make because it's not, you know, there's nothing being posted to it, but I would never have that in your live software. So we start there and then we look for a series of patterns and in most software that our hot list is about 25 patterns. And these are the things that thieves use over and over. The other thing I'll mention is that almost every Th5ever Met

uses multiple ways to steal concurrently. In other words, we see very few one trick ponies. Wow, so you know, when we're looking at detection and when we're paying attention to detection percentage, that helps us tremendously. How long does the, you know, for someone who is working with you? And I know this could, this could vary, right? It's just like the beginning and saying, well, how long does this be proceeding? I'll take a look at the pins on how you are as a patient, right?

But, you know, in, on average, like how long does this take? Is this, is this few weeks, few months? I mean, obviously, if a practice owner is concerned, that could be very stressful wondering what is going on. And our, our target turnaround time is eight weeks. Okay. And the first two weeks of that typically are spent

with us gathering the stuff we need in order to do an investigation. And we have an onboarding team here who's jobit is to gather that stuff. So when the file gets assigned to one of our investigators, we have about 15 investigators. When the file gets assigned to one of them, and, you know, the basic stuff is already there so that they're ready to go and they, you know,

kind of like when you go in to do a hygiene check, you sort of want to see the patient there and the radiography of the hygienist progress notes. And, you know, you want all that stuff in place when you hit the opportunity. So we kind of do the same thing. That takes about two weeks. And then normally one of our investigators

is on the file for about six weeks. So if stealing is happening, the discovery could happen any time really within that six week window. And we normally try to sort of triage. We try to assess where it's most likely to be happening and look their first. So, you know, one thing that I continually

be into our investigators is you need to form, you need to start the process by forming a hypothesis. And the hypothesis is really a function of access. So if our suspect is a bookkeeper, for example, and isn't involved in the revenue side of the practice at all, but rates checks and does payroll, then those are the places you're going to look. If our suspect is a financial coordinator

who's involved in the revenue side, but, you know, doesn't touch payroll, doesn't touch payables, then logically we're looking in practice management software. So we try to do that, you know, discovery could happen any time. And when it does, we let the doctor know that and help them get whoever's got their hand in the doctor's pocket to get them out the door. And then we need to go back and finish our work

and issue our final report, you know, do all the things we need to do when we see a measurement. And once that happens, like once you've done the investigation and you get all the evidence and you're ready to present it, how does that work when it comes when it goes from your team into the actual authorities, if the doctor wants to escalate that, like is there, is that pretty seamless?

Is that add on extra time as well? And you were experienced, how does that work? I'm sure most people are thinking about that right now. Like from your investigation, then they're like, okay, I want to escalate this to the actual authorities. Yeah, well, let's ask a really basic question first. I mean, why use us at all? Why not just call the cops?

Yeah. And the answer is because this is such a technical crime and it is just way beyond the ability of any police department in the United States to investigate. So they really need somebody who understands the industry and practice management software and all this stuff to do the work and then tell the police what happened

and from there they'll make sure that the law gets applied. So, you know, our role is really to do something that they can't do. So at the end, let's say we find a measurement, you know, let's just assume that it's your practice and we found $80,000 of a measurement. So now your focus is how do I get my money back? Or how do I get as much a bit back as I can?

This sometimes, Dan is don't realize this. You all have some level of insurance for this. Built into your property insurance is something called employee dishonesty coverage. Normally the coverage limit is $25,000. So the first thing that happens is you're gonna hand our report to your insurance company because that's the input they'll need in order to pay that claim

for you. Your insurance company will require this to have been reported to the police. And that's a generic requirement for any loss that you're claiming on your insurance because of a crime. I mean, if your car is stolen and you wanna claim on your insurance, they're gonna say the same thing. We need a police report.

Yeah, police report. So it goes to police first and then to your insurance company. Your insurance company typically will pay in four to six weeks and then they're out of the picture. From there, the police may do what I call secondary investigation. In other words, they may do some things that I really don't have the power to do. Like they can call a suspect in a question of now.

Every suspect has fifth amendment, right? So they don't have to answer any of the questions but they do have to at least sit there and be asked them.

The other thing that a lot of dentists don't realize is that the police aren't the only entry into the justice system. So if our work is done the way it should be done, we actually don't need the police and you can go right to the district attorney and start the process there. And that makes things happen a whole lot faster. Yeah.

So that's how it gets into the justice system. The justice system uses us a lot to explain things to them. I mean, I was, I spent probably half an hour on the phone yesterday with a detective from the Los Angeles Police Department on the case that we're working on. And I kind of had to take this guy through the basics. So, well, you know how when you go into the dentist,

your insurance plan pays probably 80% of a lot of stuff and you pay the other 20. I mean, this was kind of the level of conversation I'm having. You know, it's not that he was stupid but this is just a problem. He's being used to that. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, he said, you know, a month ago, I was working in identity theft and this is really my first and mezzlement case. Wow. You know, we got another question here. Let's put this up here. And it is, what if you don't suspect anyone? But you just don't wanna become a victim.

Do you have a service for that? And I think we kind of touched based on that. But if, what if a dog is just like, hey, it's just kind of like I have the IT guy come and check everything and I have the equipment guy come check everything, I have my CPA look at some stuff. What if I just wanna have you guys just take a look and just make sure, is that something you do

or is it normally, like, we have a question. We will happily do that. If somebody wants what I would think of, Glenn is a prophylactic investigation. We're happy to do that. The other thing I'll mention though is that we have a second service called the Office Protection System. And what that involves is working with a doctor

to help them perfect their systems. In other words, most embezzlement happens because there's a weakness in your systems. And I'm using systems here in the broadest sense. So I'm not talking about your practice management software only. I'm also talking about how you background check people before you hire them.

And what your procedure is when a patient makes a cash payment and security settings in your software. And it involves a lot of different things. But we have a service where one of our more experienced team members will work with a doctor understand what they're doing now and say, OK, well, here's how you're exposed. And this is what we can do about it.

So I just kind of, there's other question here. This is going to be an interesting one for you, David. This doctor has multi-locations. And they have centralized services. So I'm assuming this doctor is a partner in a DSO. Yeah, it sounds up. And he wants to know if you could audit, like would you be able to audit, not just the practice.

I'm talking about the whole entity. Yeah. That's just, that gives me a headache just think it about that. We turn again. And again, we can do a couple of different things. We can do audit based stuff where we're looking at transactions. Or we can work with that entity on how it delivers its services. And I mentioned office protection system.

We actually have a DSO version of that, OK. Where we look at centralized functions. Because if, because they're doing all the billing for all this, because it's one of the key things to cross you. And the one could, I mean, that's a lot of money right there. Well, there's kind of an extra layer there. So once you cross about five practices, typically people are starting to think about, well, what can I pull out

of individual practices and centralized, because it's more efficient. So making a re-care phone calls, for example, is a great activity to take out of individual practices and have a call center do. So yeah, we audit those functions. And we're often called upon to look at, for example, how information flows back and forth between individual practices

and the centralized groups and whether there's potential for something to happen there. So yeah, I love to have a conversation with your caller about, or your person messaging there, about what might be in play for them. I mean, it would just make sense. And again, each time there's an extra layer, I mean, it could be maybe then it just escalates,

it's not from the office level. Now it's on the corporate level, what's so in who's dealing that, which is, I mean, that's a lot of money there. So that was a great question there. I have a question myself, and have you ever had a situation where you found multiple people in bezeling? But they weren't working together.

They just happened to just like, this guy is just an easy mark and the bookkeeper wasn't bezeling. The funny thing, like, has that ever happened to a more practice order just got a bezel left and right? It sure has. And we do see some close of fraud, and that's where two or maybe three people are working together. And I've also seen, it's not common,

but I've probably seen, I don't know, three or four instances in my career where there were two independent thefts going on. Wow. There was one case we saw too that was kind of funny, because it was a situation where two people were working together in the same office and no one bezelment was happening. And then they each got let go for different reasons.

And they were each working in a different office, and they both started stealing. Wow. So, I think the guy who fired them probably dodged a bullet or two there and just didn't perhaps realize his good fortune when he let them go. Yeah, that worth a ticking time, Bob. Wow.

I just want to kind of lay out how prevalent office investment is.

And obviously you're the expert in the dental field. Can you just, David, can you just talk about, like, how many clients do you normally have? How many cases you normally work with in a year? Yeah, we typically have between 100 and 110 active investigations at any point in time. So those are open files we're working on right now. Wow.

So it comes out probably to 600, 700 per year in a typical year.

But let's relate it back to sort of population numbers, so that which I think the dentist will find it easier to relate to. The good news if you're a dentist is there's about a 20% chance that you'll go through your whole career and not be stolen from. That's the good news. The bad news is there's an 80% chance that you will. Yeah.

The 88 has done a couple of studies on this. And there was one that was published in 2019. So what the 88 did was went to about 17,000 dentists and said, have you been a bezel? And the first question was either, the answers were either yes or I don't think so. 53% of those surveys said, I don't think so. And 47% said yes.

Wow. So that's catching dentists on average at the midpoint in their careers. So some of the 53% who said, as far as I know, I haven't been, are going to get in in the rest of their careers. But then they took the 47% who said yes and asked them how many times. And about half of that 47% said once as far as I know. And then the rest, we're stratified between twice three times and four or more times.

Oh my gosh. Um, 11% of the dentists surveyed. So this is about a quarter of the ones who said yes, I've been a bezel. Said four or more times. So one day just for fun, I did a little frequency calculation where I took, you know, the pretend who said they'd been a bezel once times one and the percent who said they've been a bezel twice times two and so on. And if you did that, you came out with per hundred dentists,

93 embezzlement had been identified. So it happens a lot. And. Sometimes it's little stuff. I mean, it's toilet paper from the restaurant or something. And sometimes as we talked about early on, it's millions of dollars. Yeah, gosh.

Well, and some, yeah, and look, who knows, maybe the people that you've worth with, you caught it before it got to millions of dollars. And I'm sure that when you looked at it and you saw the trend, you could see, like if I didn't intervene, I just helped this guy or this practice owner, I just saved them from being like one of these statistics

on the wall of shame where you could have been millions of dollars. I'm sure that you saw the way I was trending like that. Well, in fairness, I didn't save them from that. They did. Yeah. You know, they identified the need and called me. I mean, we don't, you know, we don't sort of just go and barge in any practice we feel like and say,

I'm here to save you. We get called, but somebody, you know, they were really the catalyst for, as you say, capping this at a, you know, at kind of the nuisance level as opposed to the, the multimillion dollar level. But, you know, we're just kind of the, the tool in that. What we do try to do though,

and this conversation is a, is a great kind of vehicle for that. As we try to raise awareness, we try to make people understand how common this is and how destructive it is and, you know, encourage them in if there's fighting sense and just tingling not to sort of put it on ignore. Yeah. No, I love it. I love it.

Well, David, I mean, it's, I mean, we can, I'm definitely gonna have to bring you back here because there's so much that's, and I'm sure we're gonna get more questions later on when people start watching this. But David, I got you in the nifty group and I've been wanting to bring you in because obviously what you provide is so valuable.

Obviously, with someone like Dr. Chris Phil saying that he personally uses your company and how it's helped his practice. I mean, that's a huge endorsement right there. But again, you don't know what you don't know, right? And at the end of the day, it's, yeah, you might have that gut feeling, but a lot of times it happens for people that you trust and you never know, right?

So this is super important. And I feel like everyone in this group, right? In this group is trying to grow their pride. It's trying to do things the right way. They can benefit from your help and your guidance. So, without being said, you're in the nifty group and I'm always gonna bring up a nifty deal.

And what can you do to help out our members, to get them, obviously you got them aware. And now they're probably wondering, okay, I'm aware and now I wanna work with you. What can you do for our viewers and our group members? Well, we do a few things for them. First of all, we create an open door for communication. So anybody who's listening,

who's a practice owner is invited to call me or email me, you know, set up a time and have a conversation at no cost. And, you know, I'm happy to hear about their practice and what concerns them, provide some assessment tools if that's needed. And ultimately if we need to jump into, to do that. So completely open door for any of your group, first of all.

I love that. Yeah, I mean, there you go. There's a cost anything to kind of reach out to you and talk to you about their situation, their concerns. It costs you a little bit of time and, you know, whatever your phone company charges you and that after, well, actually we usually do it by Zoom. So not even.

Anyway, that's an open door. And, you know, I've got a lot of people working with me but some things I will not delegate and having a conversation with a concerned dentist is one of those things. So, you know, that door's open to all, all of the nifty members. The second thing is we do have some discounted pricing.

It's, you know, there are probably other things that come out through Glenn's group that have a bigger discount. Our ours is 5% across the board. Hey, from what you're gonna be saving them, that's huge. So I'm gonna tell you right there, like the information right here alone is huge. And then of course, hopefully, let's, you know,

let's not call on wood here. Hopefully, there's nothing that turns up in the investigation but if there is, imagine the savings right there. Savings as in people not in bezeling you anymore and putting a cap to that bezelman. That's a huge savings there. That's part of it Glenn. The other part is piece of mind.

I have some great conversations with the doctors who treat sleep apnea. Because I say to them, you know, fundamentally we do the same thing. Except that you have to mess around with oral appliances and sleep studies and stuff. You know, we just look at your books. We give you a report and it doesn't really matter

what our report says. You're gonna sleep better at the end. Yeah. I love that. So we're really in the sleep business. I love that. Those are guys. Those are amazing nifty deals.

Again, if you like what you're hearing type in the comments section, David, but look, there's the website we put the chronicle on there. Reach out. It's a free phone conversation, right? Zoom call, right? You're spending some time. I can tell you right now,

if you got a lot of value from this short amount of time that David has been here, I can promise you that you're gonna get as much if not more value when you talk to him. Okay. And then of course, the 5% discount, that's huge, David. Thank you so much for taking care of our group there.

But let me go ahead and hide this here. So again, you can see the website there. We'll put it in the comments section there. Reach out to him and David, I need to ask you for a favor right now. I want to ask you for everybody. Will you please come back and do this again for us? I would love to.

I mean, because here's the thing. I mean, I can tell you right now as people are jumping on and watching this they're jumping on watching at different times or probably gonna go back and watch it again, they're probably gonna have a whole bunch of questions. And we're definitely gonna have to bring you back and get those questions answered

and also get some more amazing pearls that you've been sharing. So could you promise me that David? I look for John the spot there. You can count on it. I love it. David, thank you so much for jumping on. For those who are watching, thanks for tuning in. And we'll see you guys next time.

Thank you, God. Well, there you have it guys. That is the latest nifty thrifty deal. And if you're interested in this particular deal, visit our website www.niftythriftytennis.com. If you're not part of our Facebook group, you need to join it nifty thrifty tennis. Join our group of over 17,000 dental professionals

so that you can network and learn how to stay money in your dental practice. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you guys next time.