You Ask, We Answer

Auto-generated transcript: You Ask, We Answer

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.

Join us on a regular basis for back-lives, and we wanted to have a special edition of our Prosperident Power Hour. You ask, we answer. So we wanted everybody who's attended, and people on the dental world to submit their questions to us, so that we could take the time to go over some important facts with you, our special audience. Back to you, Dave.

I wanted to start tonight by just reintroducing us, because it's been a while since we told you about who we are, and we just kind of assume sometimes that everybody knows. I'm David Harris, I'm the CEO of Prosperident. I've been investigating dental and bezel-lit now for 31 years, and a couple of weeks. I'm a CPA, but please don't hold that against me. I'm also a certified fraud examiner,

and what's called certified in financial forensics. My two cohabosts, who I think of privately as the Texas Pernados, because they both live in Texas, I should introduce, and I'll start with Amber Weber. Amber spent years as a dental hygienist, and then moved in office management, and then consulting, and then I has been with us since 2018. We have three levels of examiner here,

which are called fraud examiner, senior fraud examiner, and supervising examiner. So Amber was promoted, actually, we did it here on one of these episodes to senior examiner. She's our newest senior, but has a whole lot of background. Anyway, she's a terrific gal. The other thing I'll mention is that this whole webinar series

was Amber's idea, and she came to me with it, and said, well, you know, people have all this downtime, and I've been arguing about it. My response was basically, you know, I don't know if anybody's interested in that. Anyway, we did it anyway. We've had over 3,500 people to our webinars, and it was absolutely Amber's branch up.

So that's co-host number one. Co-host number two is Wendy Askins. Wendy is one of our longest serving investment investigators. She started with us, actually, I ended up looking up today in 2012. So eight plus years for Wendy. Wendy is one of three people who hold the title here of supervising examiner. So there are most senior examiners and tackle some of the really ugly files.

Wendy also heads our orthodonic investigation department, and she has a very deep background in orthodonic and really, you know, understands that business like nobody. Tonight, we get to have a little surprise for Wendy, because we're going to present her with something tonight. One of the things that we recognize that prosperity is milestones for when people have uncovered a certain amount of investment. And it's my great honor tonight to present Wendy with her $2 million pin.

It's a gold pin with the prosperity. But do you want to reach through the screening, grab it? Yeah, you can. Here's the actual pin in how it walks. I was worried Wendy that if I opened the box, people would think I was going to propose to you or something. And I have a wife and she has a husband. So let's just take that off the table now.

But anyway, it's a tremendous honor to recognize Wendy's achievement. And I'm covering the $2 million of investment. And what I have to tell the audience, Wendy, that they probably wouldn't know otherwise, is that the actual investment in those cases was much, much, much higher than that. And all we're counting is what Wendy counted in each case before she started. And when you're investigating a investment,

there's always a point where it just doesn't make sense to keep looking anymore. And that happens actually fairly early in most investigations. And we're going to talk about dental insurance coverage for this little while. And I think the audience will see exactly what I mean. But that's the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Anyway, congratulations Wendy. And it's truly an honor to be working with you. Thank you so much.

Okay, well, I'm going to ask, again, thank you so much Dave, that means so much to me. I'm going to try to complies myself. If you know me, the person you know I'm a cryer. So anyway, so today's webinar, you ask and we answer. Our webinar is going to be a little bit longer this evening, because we really want to spend time answering your questions and detail. Now, so if this is your first webinar,

you're not aware what we did was we send a charge out over social media and in the past webinar that we did last month, we're going to be asking, what would you like us to talk about more? What do you want to hear more about? And so lots of people send in questions and we picked the top 14 to the 15 questions. So we're going to be answering those for you today. And we're also going to be answering some live questions at the end. So if you think of anything during this session, please, don't hesitate to chat it out to us and we'll be able to answer that for you as well.

So like I said before, we get a lot of questions. As investment becomes more the topic of conversation. And honestly, as people are becoming more comfortable in talking about it, even our clients are becoming more comfortable in getting their testimonies or telling about their experience, as you saw with some of the individuals in the beginning before we started the webinar. What we're finding are people just have a whole lot of questions. And during this webinar, we're not able to answer all of them because we get barrage by questions. So we either end up missing them, getting a slight overview of the answer,

or we have to return the answer in an email. So this is a wonderful opportunity. that we're taking tonight. We're going to slow down and we're going to be detailed about the top 14 to 15 questions that were sent into us by your colleagues. Take it away Amber. All right. So our first question is a question that we get asked many times. Sometimes before we complete an investigation. Sometimes if we're not even completing an investigation and it is easy, I'm going to fire this employee anyway. I also think they might be embezzling. Do I need to wait until after profanity finishes? So we did a webinar on this that you can reference to, uh, called breaking

up as hard to do. But the simple answer is no. You do not have to have proof or catch someone red handed to terminate their appointment with you. There are some things you need to be aware of though that if you're in an outwell state that allows you to terminate an employee, you need to make sure you have reference and there's not legal ramifications such as unemployment, discrimination. But the main thing to remember here is terminating an employee should not make reference to possible on business. So in the past we discussed that this, that you need to have documentation and policies and procedures in place that gives you a good foundation for terminating that employee and gives you good reasoning that allows you to terminate them for other causes.

We also have a termination checklist available for you. So definitely visit our website or email us or contact us and we can give you some reference for that. But the short answer is no, you do not have to have proof of the development to let someone go that you are willing to let anyone go. Wendy would you like to add or Dave would you like to add to that question? I would mind the thing I told people about this a lot Amber is that stealing is against the law even if somebody never worked for you. So you know sometimes people think like if you're investigating that somehow they're going to make our job heard, if they let that person know before you get to the end of it, and what we do it really doesn't matter whether they're playing

a player or something, whether somebody's still working there when we're investigating or not. So if you're unhappy with the ingrained, you know, even if it turned out that they weren't stealing if they still get fired, then just do what Amber said. I mean do it properly, but there's no need to wait for us. And I would like to add to that on the story of a case that I recently finished up. The employee was attirminated just a few weeks before we got the information. And through conversations with the client, there's been a pattern change since the employee's been gone. So, you know, with new policies and procedures, now the doctor can see the pattern that she has to complete where she had done. Yeah, good point. I'm sorry Amber, I was answering a question

when you were talking about that, but one thing that I've seen with some of my clients is that they they get ready to fire someone because they have a suspicion that that person is investing, but they don't have proof yet. And when they separate with that employee, they'll say something like, well, I suspect you're seemingly from me. Or, well, we got some cash missing. I would like to urge our watchers to be extremely careful when you do that. If you're going to fire someone specifically for him, that's only that you better have proof of it. That's why I've experienced it, how specific system that you follow in information that we give out. Just watch what you say when you're separating from an employee. Yeah, good advice. All right, question two.

What can you do if you suspect investment from somebody who's not with you anymore? Is there a statute of limitations? That's a great question. The first thing I'll say is, absolutely, we can invest in you. Personally, I had to do at least one investigation where I was going back eight years. Amber and Wendy both know this, but once you start looking more than three years in the past, it gets increasing on the challenge. Some of the records that you need to investigate may not be available anymore. And people's memories are fallible. You know, if you ask somebody, when you're in the dental practice for months ago, you happen to remember him and you paid. Most people could probably answer that question. When you ask somebody, okay, when you're in

the dental practice on July 2nd, 2015, you remember how you paid. People aren't going to do it. So it gets more challenging than further back you have to reach, but it can be done. In terms of limitation periods, there are three conceivably that you might have to do it. The first one is insurance. In other words, in every insurance contract, there's a requirement for you to submit a clean within a certain period of time. And in terms of making a claim against your insurance, and we're going to talk more about insurance coverage that you have for a dozen of later, but in terms of making a claim, you have to follow the contract language and the policy. If you're conducting somebody, if your intent is to have somebody convicted criminally,

again, there are limitation periods. And these are set state by state or if you're in Canada by the national rules. And if you're doing somebody, again, there's a limitation to when you can do that. Now, having said that, there's this concept called the discovery. And what the discovery rule says is the limitation period starts when you become aware of the addition. So let's say for example, that you're hit by a car. Typically, when you're hit by a car, you know you were hit. So the clock starts ticking at that moment. And in a lot of places, you have, for example, three years to bring a loss in after you were hit by that. What the limitation periods are designed to do is

provide a limit to the period when you could take action and you chose not to. With a measurement, it's a little bit different. The discovery might happen years after the crime was committed. So you may have been embezzled by somebody who left you in 2019 and you found there the voted yesterday. Well, that can use the clock starts yesterday, not in 2019. So the door never closes here simply because you are unaware of any help. It's once you have awareness, that's when that's when your time to act becomes limited. In most states, the criminal statute of limitations is somewhere between three and six years. And in most places, the civil limitation is usually six years, again, from discovery. The one other thing I'll mention about

a measurement. that's different than other types of crime is that most crime is a single app.

You know, if you get burden on you, somebody comes in your house and they take all your stuff in their gone within 20 minutes. And those will then is a lot more like a grouping faucet than it is like a flash flood. And people will commit a measurement, you know, on average, a general detector about two years, but it can stretch their fibrosanics or tent. A lot of considering a sense, if the most recent activity is within the limitation period, then every other activity is as well. So somebody starts a better line from you in 2002. And you fire within 2018 and you discovered in 2020. As long as you act within the statutory limitation period from discovery in 2020, you can go right back to 2002. In other words, it's not like part of

what somebody did is within the limitation period of part of the data is outside of that's not how it works. If the most recent act is within the limitation period, then you can go back to the end. So it's not totally straightforward, but this is not the big obstacle with people doing things that they sometimes think of this. The question number three, what kind of practices external IT advisors do to help protect the owner against the development? So the first key word you're going to talk about is backup, and what I want to tell everybody listening is your data is like the backbone, it's like the engine of your practice, everything that we have going on now is all computer-based, everything is through technology. So think of it as the engine of your practice, so you have to regular

get your oil change in your engine, and you have to have a professional mechanic help you do things to keep that engine running and make it last a long time, and so you don't lose the power and the usability of that engine. So the number one thing is when you talk about IT, this is not a DIY do-it-yourself job. One main thing we talk about is you definitely want to have a backup system, but also have a secondary off-site backup system. So if that engine in your practice, that data in your computer or your physical hard drive is compromised, you still have something to back up the data, and you haven't lost it. The main thing about this, you want that professional advisor, and you to be aware that it was carefully thought out, and that it's protected and compliant. So

once again, a lot of practice owners think that they can complete this on their own, but you really need a professional advisor help you with this. The other thing we recommend is do an occasional week to make sure that everything has been installed and is not installed about authorization. Nowadays, with a lot of people working from home, you know, if you're going to allow remote access, you need to make sure that it's carefully thought out. There's so many different ways to remote access into different systems, and that's why you need that IT professional to make sure that what you're allowing to access that engine, that data of your practice as well thought out, and it's been authorized so that you make sure that somebody without your knowledge didn't

install access that you did not want them to have. The third thing that we're seeing now is a fan and malware. There's so many ways that people can access your data without your knowledge, and I want you to think of it this way. This is kind of like a violent, bankruptcy in your practice. If malware gets installed on your computer and people can seal access your data and you don't have a way to put a stop for it. They don't have to have a done or get away cart and fleet this. So, definitely you want to have an IT department that's making sure you don't have things going into your system that's allowing people who shouldn't have access to that data to install a map, malware, and have spam popping up that can compromise

that good engine of your practice or data in your computer system. Do you have anything that you would like to add to that profit date? Maybe one thing and we'll just talk about the impact of COVID ahead. I mean, if you ask me a year ago, who should have remote access to my practice management software? My answer would be practice owners only no staff. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's realistic right now where more people are working from home and that I think remote access for some of your staff. You know, if somebody's doing recall phone calls for a, for example, looking hygiene appointments, there's really no particular reason they need to do that from your office. So, I think we have to adapt a little bit and say, you know, there was a time when we

dissent remote access to staff is a bad idea. I guess what I'd say now is it has to be judicious in other words, not every front desk person who normally works from in the office needs remote access. So we're still in to control a lot. Definitely. Number four, what systems should be in place to avoid or eliminate staff from the Mezzling cash? This is how popular this question is. We've already had two people ask about cash right as the webinar began. I'll read one from Perry who says, how do you feel about accepting cash? We have a few patients who always pay in cash. Since COVID-19, we use that opportunity to discontinue accepting cash. Now we are getting back to any advice. Well, I'm not there with you, Kerry. You know, I've been in dentistry in some

form for about 30 years and I'm very, very patient and venience centered and it's hard for me to say, you know, hey, just don't take cash anymore. There are some areas and some specialties in which that can be handled and that is appropriate. Specialty wise, I'm talking about orthodonic sports, where they have the monthly payments and you set them up on an auto monthly. So you don't take cash. It's auto monthly payments. But to be honest with you, there are just some areas or some rule areas in which depending on the demographics of that area, you have to take cash. So I would recommend try to cut it down as much as possible and if you can't, then we have some other guidelines for you to follow as well. And also, another thing about that is I heard a few consultants

come up with some video. three calming and creative verbiage and some different solutions like asking the patient to maybe just mail in a check or something like that if they can, I don't know, anyway, you can check with whatever consultant that you're working with that's really good with words because I'm really not. Lot to cash drawer. I'm always amazed how we take cash and checks and insurance checks and all of the money from our office that we received and we just stick it in a drawer beside the person who's posting this payments into the computer system. Actually, the very first orthodanic office that I ever worked in, brush-on-a-callage, the receptionist was busy at the end of the day, doing the day sheet and adding everything up and she got, she finished everything, course we still had patients in the office. She was getting everything all gathered up and someone came and asked a question and she got up from the front desk and walked away from it.

Now, we had patients filling it floating in and out in front of her desk, so guess what happened when she came back, the entire deposit was gone. So we're not just talking about investment from within your office, we're talking about your patients too. We were also talking about, you know, some people leave money in their drawers overnight. A cleaning person could come in there, anybody could come in and take that money out. So we recommend that the funds that you keep especially cash, you keep it in a locked drawer. Now, this is kind of a passion of mine. Don't play games with the IRS. I have a lot of clients that say to me, well, I take money home. I take the cash home with me because I think it's more secure that way.

Well, if you've listened to our webinars before, you know that that's not true, but that's not what we're really addressing with this section. What I'm addressing with this section is when those funds are taken by the business owner. Those are your funds. And you can do whatever you want to with them. However, you need to be cognizant that whatever your staff members see you do, they will do also. For example, I had a case of two partners that were working together and they had an agreement that when a large paid in full cash. The patient would come in, which would be around 8,000 dollars. That the staff member was told to post that into the computer.

That evening, one of those partners would come and back that transaction out, deleted out, and then out in adjustment. And then those two owners would split that money, right? Hey, it's their money. They can do whatever they want to with it. And by them doing that, what they did was they gave their staff member permission to do the exact same thing and she did. Okay, so they taught her how to steal. Secondly, if you're going to take the money home with you, make sure you have a record of what you've saw. I recommend signing actually signing the day sheet that you've taken possession or you've taken custody of those funds. If it ever happens that there is a question about if those funds were deposited or they not deposited who took them and they simply and the staff member simply says, oh, the doctor takes the cash.

And the doctor or the practitioner can't account for how much cash has gone home with them. Then you can't prove it was that. For example, I had a case of a doctor who was taking cash home with him and that's fine. I did a list for it. And I said, these are cash deposits that we're missing from your bank. Did you take this money home? And it was like 35,000 dollars. And he said, absolutely not. I did not take that much money. I took maybe about 10. And I said, can you show me your records of the cash that you took home? He had no records. And therefore, he had no case that that had occurred.

So if you're going to take money home with you, make sure you make a record of it in your office and make sure you deposit it in the bank or make a note to your CPA of the amount because the IRS grounds on that. Right, but no judgment here, but the IRS realm. Okay, go ahead, babe. Sorry. Balancing staff and reconciliation owner. Okay. Dave and Amber jump in here with me and help keep you focused because you know I'm passionate about this. At the end of the day, you got your funds there. You're sad, remember got your funds there and you got your day sheet there. How do you know that they match? It's your staff members responsibility on a daily basis on Adam and about that. Some people aren't, but I am on a daily basis that they take the checks.

And the cash and the money or all physical payments that are there. They look at them. They look at the day sheet and they make sure that it they match. That all the information was to just correct. Then you add up those funds individually and you make sure that amount balances with the amount that's listed on the day sheet. If there's an error, you correct it, right? So whoever balances person number one balances. Then they sign the day sheet that it's been balanced and then person number two comes in and balances as well. And it's not it doesn't necessarily have to be about. Enbezzlement or theft. It can be just about correcting errors and finding errors.

Like if you've ever worked in an office, you know that one day you check the day sheet and there's like a hundred thousand dollars person out of patience account. You're like, oh, wow, it's an error, right? If you're not if you're not balancing or if you're not balancing, you never catch those errors, right? So that's the part that your staff does. Now reconciliation is also what a passion had about. And that's what the owners responsible for or the owner is responsible for following up with someone and making sure that it gets done on a monthly basis. That's where you find that if it's happening in certain areas, which you want to make sure that you're comparing the data that comes out of your practice management software with what actually went into the bank, right? Pairing what comes out of your software with what's recorded in your quickbooks? No, comparing quickbooks to what goes into the bank?

No. D- These two practice management is on square with what actually goes into the bank. And Dave is going to talk about float cash and pay the cash. Just to show up.

Well, actually, I wanted to, I wanted to amplify something. You said, I have a lot of practice owners who say to me, you know, one of the things I do to protect myself is I make the bank deposit myself. And I say to them, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I understand that you get to know protection. Your protection comes from knowing how much the bank deposit should be. And ensuring that that amount of money actually got to the bank. And who carries it to the bank is kind of irrelevant. The question is, did the right amount arrive there?

So that requires two things. It requires more money. You said, you have to start by knowing how much the deposit should be. And then you have to check that that was the amount that was deposit. If you do those two things, as I say, it doesn't really matter who takes the money to the bank. And when you're seeing how much money went into the bank, don't rely on the deposit. So it's because it's a piece of paper, which means that it can be altered. The only thing that's really valid is to go to online banking and login and see what the deposit was.

And that's that's an equi-bicle. Yeah, in terms of what I'm supposed to be talking about here, which is the flow cash versus petty cash. A lot of practices do something that makes their lives a lot hurt. They have one cash work and cash comes in when patient pay it and cash goes out when, for example, the owner, forgets her lunch money and takes $20 under the cash. And the problem with that taking the $20 out of the cash is that then at the end of the day, whoever's balancing the cash, that's the right to know is that that happened and has to sort of take one more calculation to determine the balance. It's a whole lot easier if you think of two independent amounts of cash.

Just flow cash and flow cash is what you use to make changes when patients come into pay. So the idea of flow cash is it should start the day at the same amount every single day. So if it's $500 in your practice, basically what happens at the end of the day is whoever's balancing the cash, counts out $500 and puts it back in the door and everything else, which should add up to what your practice van is in the software. So if the cash received today is those tuition line up, the access over 500 is to just go right in the bank. And there should be no further calculation other than looking at you know separating out the the starting amount of of today's world, which is also the starting amount of tomorrow's world. From everything else and everything else should be what you collected today. Okay, that keeps it really simple and full group.

The second cash is called petty cash. And what petty cash is, is that's what we use when the practice has to pay out something in cash. You know, somebody sends you a lab case and they, you know, for whatever reason they didn't pay the courteor and you have to pay them. Or like I say, Dr. Freda is much money or, you know, you're, you're, you're kind of that, you know, some some patients mother die and you're going to send flowers and you're paying cash. Petty cash is for that stuff for outgoing cash. The way that that works is it starts in a set of mount let's say it's $200. Anytime cash goes out of petty cash, it gets replaced by a receipt. And therefore cash plus receipts always add up to using my number $200. When the cash gets low, what the office manager does because normally it's the office manager who's the custodian of pay cash.

What the office manager does is gather up all the receipts and you're ready to check in the amount of all those receipts and that sheet cash is it puts that money. And then you're back to 200. If you keep them separate life gets a lot of somewhere. I mean, petty cash only needs to be looked at like once a full cash needs to be done every day. Again, the offices that combine them just make a lot of work for themselves. Yeah. Can I add something to that last topic today? Yeah. So in the fact that some officers are still going to be taking cash. One thing that I would recommend offices require as part of your policy and procedure is that receipts be printed off for patients no matter what form of payment.

They are completing with your practice. So whether you're accepting cash or credit card or text from a patient you need to make sure that every receipt is printed for every single patient so that it's in your software and your audit log. And in some way to track to see what type of payment was completed and that a receipt has been printed off. In my experience, I've had a lot of staff members say, oh, the patient didn't want the receipt. They'll make them print a receipt so that you have a hard physical copy that came through to software and you have that proof that it was that it came through. It's a good idea. I mean, the smart things can find a different way to issue receives them running through the practice van and software. But. And was right. Let's not make it easy for you.

Right. Our next question question number five, what is the best way to avoid or eliminate time feed. So this, you know, as people come in and out of your office, a lot of times they will forget to clock in clock out. So that's one way we'll see it happen. But the key point here we want to make sure everybody understands is when you hire somebody, whether they're salary or hourly, whatever your agreement is, you need to have that documented in writing. So it's like a clinical note on a patient if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen. So I've had some cases with some payroll where people have been doubled money that way, but there was no hard concrete documentation of what was agreed upon. So just make sure when you hire somebody that you have it in writing what your agreement is without staff members. And like I said, people will come in and come out. They may forget to clock in and clock out using your technology.

The great new things that technology offers us now is a biometric reader and that's where they just put their fingerprint right when they arrive and then they use their fingerprint as they leave. It's really hard for somebody else to change their time for them because it goes off of their fingerprint. So that's a great thing about it. And these readers are really affordable now. They used to be pretty pretty expensive, but if you really refer to biometric reader, you'll see that they're very affordable. And that's one way to better safeguard yourself. The other thing is for those people who forget to clock in, forget to clock out, forget to use a software for their lunch break. It really makes sure that not everybody can go in and change their time. That that's limited. You're yourself or your office manager.

It's really hard for somebody to just go in and change their time. And there has to be some accountability that they go to that person and say, hey, I didn't clock in. You can't even clock out and help me with that. So it allows you to have some accountability. Now, most offices are going to pay you're going to pay your staff every two weeks. I weekly or twice a month, whatever your policy is. But that's a lot of hours and a lot of moving parts. So one thing we definitely recommend is a practice owner. At the end of the week, part of your weekly closing duty,

review those hours and make sure you approve the hours that have happened for the week. So that one payroll comes around on payday comes around. You don't have a stack of time to review. And you don't have people just saying, oh yeah, that was right. That was right. You don't have to say back so far.

So start approving your time at the end of every week for your staff members. Then if you're using a third party provider to do your payroll, you want to make sure that you have a review of all those time entries and how that's being completed. You need to review your payroll system against time entries or salary.

So like I said, if you're using a third party provider, you want to make sure that what was completed on your vial metric, reader, your software, that it matches what the report that you get from your CPA or somebody else is completing or your payroll. A new question here too, with our COVID-19 base, we're changes how we were talking about people

or remoteing and working from home, the salary makes sense. Some people want to be put on a salary rather than have this hourly time clock, but you still need to track it and monitor it and make sure that's being completed in a written standard procedure that makes sense for you and a team member. And kind of a follow-up question to this. If somebody is stealing through payroll

or possibly bonus manipulation, what you need to prove that they commit it for. And the answer I normally give people is this. We need one of two things, documentation or deception. Documentations, what Amber talked about, a minute ago. If we're going to accuse somebody of payroll fraud, we need to be able to prove either to that.

They took more money than their contract permitted or deception, which I'll talk about in a minute. We're writing to a lot of cases. Now, Amber, you've done a couple of payroll cases recently. We've written a lot of cases where, what the employee is supposed to be paid can't be proven. Maybe there's no written employment contract or maybe there was one 10 years ago,

but they've gotten six pay raise since then. It doesn't necessarily have to be a formal contract. There's 12 pages along and signed in blood. And exchange of emails where you can do it. I agree to raise your salary from $17. Now, in 1825, we'd be enough to establish what somebody should have been paid. But the basic problem you get into is

if you can't prove what they should have been paid. Let's say this is the person who's preparing the payroll for you. Then you have a problem.

Our legal system just does not send people to jail for your wording in steps. We've all watched a cop and lawyer shows on TV and we all understand that the threshold, the standard of proof for a criminal conviction is proof beyond a reasonable death. And mathematically, that equates to like 90% cert. So if the employees,

whereas did they were, you know, did they agree with the employer, was that they were gonna be paid $21 an hour? And the doctors were that the amount was $18. Nobody's gonna go to jail over that because it's gonna be one credible way that is against another and our justices from just will not convict on that basis.

The other issue in the camera kind of touched on this as well is that a lot of offices, the office manager does the payroll with no oversight whatsoever from the doctor. In other words, the doctor doesn't get the reports from the payroll company and I've all of them in check for salary to employees, check them against the salary for time-based employees.

They'll look at the time entries and so on. As soon as you turn your back on this one, totally, you open the door to the person preparing the payroll giving them some arrays, giving their two teachers' past raises. You can't have the key notice. The other thing that sometimes saves us no in a case of payroll fraud is deception.

So when the employee decedes the employer about what's going on, that takes away the argument that I wasn't entitled to this money. Mindy Solve's meant, who's one of our senior examiners, recently did a case and it was a practice where what the office manager was doing was overpaying themselves the way that the payroll company calculated the pay was that the office manager sent the payroll company

to the spreadsheet each pay credit. What the office manager was doing here was sending one spreadsheet to the payroll company and then a different version of the spreadsheet with their compensation lower to the practice room. In that case, we're okay with any documentation. I mean, nobody would do that unless they're stealing. So as I say, we're back to documentation or deception.

And you think the ad there are taxes for needles? You know, I would like to ask, I mean, I know it's true. And then you don't get to ask questions. We're here to answer that. I know it's true for me that I've seen a lot of payroll and bonus manipulation cases lately. And I know Amber has cost baritans as a firm in general. We'll see in increase in that, it seems like

what we used to never have payroll cases now. They're everywhere. It's true. And I've noticed the same thing. And it's, you know, I haven't studied it. So I don't have any statistics to give you. But yeah, certainly this year, maybe it's a little bit related to COVID in a couple of different possible ways.

But yeah, we've been seeing a lot more than I agree with you. Yeah, they're kind of one of the harder ones. It means an investigator. For I'll say, payroll cases are a little bit harder to do or to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, simply because the documentation is hardly ever there. Yeah, if somebody's got good documentation, this is easy.

It's a slam duck. It is. If the employment agreement, which is up to date, says that the opposite of the other is pay as $18. And we go to the payroll company and receive that she raised her pay from $18 to $21. It's a slam duck. The problem is that, and I think you're seeing three

nodding kids in front of you. Ladies and gentlemen, we all agree that practices do a Pittsburgh job of documenting somehow how employees are supposed to be paid. Yeah. And even bonuses. Yeah, bonus. Yeah.

Yeah. We see a lot of bonus calculations when it related. You know, so you've all got HR advisors. They can help you with this. Yeah. Yeah. Can I add one thing for that day? Yeah.

You know, I see a lot of issues with bonuses where specific to like just your office manager or just this. So those are that that's as those is one more area that you really have to look at. And also same with like holidays and pay time off. And in a case that I had recently rather than a certain people getting eight hours of a paid holiday, they racked on a couple more out of holidays. So it's not just about the clocking in and the clocking out. You have to look at all the logistics. And really look at those times.

She's to make sure that everything is that that's part of your policy is being completed accurately. Absolutely. Yeah. That's a great. The number seven would you recommend dentist acting together to form a database to register these investment offenders to protect others from them? I have excellent news.

We've already done that for you. If you will go to the Prosperident website, we have the Hall of Shame, which not only includes cases that were done by Prosperident, but cases that have just been publicly published all over the United States. Do we have other countries, Dave? You've got what we do. And they're okay. I usually just look for Texas.

I'm just kidding. Anyway, so from all over the world. And you can break it down by state, city, whatever you want to break it down by, you can do that. One thing that I do have a little bit of concern about is on its face, this question sounds a bit crazy to be honest. But I understand where the person that asked this question is coming from. I had a case where one doctor died in bezel for several hundred thousand dollars.

We released the suspect and she hounded him so much so that he had to have a restraining order taken out against her. And then two months later, he found out she was working for an orthodontist down the street, who had just graduated from school and passed his words. It was his first single he was hanging out. And he hired her to set up his practice because she had so much experience at doctors so in so's office. And he called me and we had a long discussion about it and it broke my heart.

And he said, Wendy, she will break him before he ever even has a chance to be successful. I can't let this happen. What are you going to do? I mean, the guy didn't call for the young doctor didn't call for a reference. My client can't go to him and say, hey, fire her. Do you know what she's done? So I could give him some advice that kind of a mob gangster would probably do. But I'm not going to share that because my boss probably would not like that.

Cause you're leaving. Because I'm leaving. Anyway, yeah. So I understand where this is coming from. But keep in mind that what you say about someone, a former employee, to another professional in public, out loud and someone over here's that that can be held against you as slander. Right. So remember that.

So don't let go right in names. Keep in a private database because you can get trouble for them. You know, I'm delivering the point I apologize. So if you happen to have a picture or a public printing, now that's the issue that we deal with at Prosperity. Everything, every person you will see on the whole chain is from a public either charged or convicted in Bezler. That's that's the important thing.

They have to be legally charged or legally convicted. Okay. If you know a one that you would like to share with us or maybe that you would like us to check out for you. Send us an email and we can help you with that. And I'm going to go a little Texas on you now. I think the reason that a lot of doctors don't call for references from their employees is number one. They're just too busy. They just don't want to take the time because they're too busy.

And number three, they want to be embarrassed. They don't want the other doctor to think they're poaching on their employee or, you know, maybe they're afraid of whether we're going to hear. Listen, please make the damn reference call. Please, you don't need a database. You don't need to prosper it at full of shame. If you'll make the damn call to a former employers and ask, would you rehire this employee? Right. A lot of people can say themselves a lot of trouble and a lot of pain if they would just pick up the phone.

All right. I'll go up my sub-boss. I'm sorry for the cursing. The problem I have with this concept as Wendy says first large, people trying to avoid making that call. We all know we have to be made. Beyond that, if doctors set up their own database like this, you get an emerging bigogram very quickly. I mean, our our polishing is extensively research. We have a very detailed policy on when we put somebody on there and we have an equally detailed policy on when we remove somebody because there are certain circumstances where we'll remove somebody.

You know, like after their deceased for example. When people start doing this on their own without those safeguards, you know, it's just the slander case waiting to out. So, you know, just use ours as Wendy said, if you have somebody that you think should be near or let us know and will. We'll research them the way we research everybody else and be happy to have them if they're in the zone.

Okay, so a lot of you practice the solo practitioners. Some of you are in that group practice or a multi-ob的是 practice, or maybe even a DSO. For those of you who don't know, DSO is dental service organization. So that's kind of a dental chain if you want to think of it that way. So heart line or aspirin dental, or any candidate,

123 dentist or somebody like that, they're examples of DSO. So it was in the question at all, if I'm in that situation, how do I handle this problem? And the first thing I'll say is if you own five offices in your life gets a lot easier, you have all five uses same practice and fitness. Now, that's easy if the way that those practices got there

was you started to meet from scratch. It's a little bit tougher if the way that you're growing is by blind practices because when you buy a practice, of course, it has whatever software it has. My suggestion you if you buy practices is that you plan from the time before you purchase to convert that practice to another software. It doesn't mean you have to do it on the day you sign the check, but there needs to be a plan.

And I would say within 69 months after acquisition, you really need to be on common software. If you have that ver software, a couple of things happen. The first is that you can't have any kind of consolidation routine. So, you know, you have information from each office. And one of the things you want to know if you won't five offices as well, you know, what was our collective revenue this month? If you're using disparate pieces of practice management software,

then, you know, somebody's got to sit there with a spreadsheet and add stuff up. Whereas you really want to be able to automate that consolidation. The second suggestion that we'll make is that if you have five offices, each one should have its own banking. It doesn't mean that you have to pay payroll from five different accounts. And you can have, you can have a head office account that does dispersions. But for deposits, it's a whole easier if each practice puts its money into its own account. And then, you know, you can consolidate all that money in the banks will do this for you.

You can consolidate it all into a central account, but flow it through an individual account. If you have one bank account that 20 different practices are deposited through, and there's no way to know if that balance there. You would need a team of accountants to figure that out. If you have one office that has one set of reports in one bank account, it gets a whole lot of stuff. The other thing is, you really need when you get to a certain size, when I'll call a reconciliation department.

So this is some bookie person typically at head office. And their job is to renew the reports from each individual practice and make sure that everything adds up to the way it's supposed to. You might recall from our previous presentations that we kind of see two kinds of events. We see a measurement that happens when reconciliation doesn't go off. In other words, where somebody steals money out of the deposit, it's easy to do because they don't have to do anything to practice management software. So if you have five practices in each one is reconciling individually, and nobody's looking over anybody's shoulder, you're vulnerable to them.

If reconciliation is done, stealing can still happen, but now it requires cooking the books. It requires playing games with practice management software, which is a little more complicated. And right to my next point, the reconciliation department in head office needs to wreck access to each individual software. In other words, it should not be like each practice, Prince Off reports and emails them to head office.

The people in reconciliation should generate their own reports first of all, and secondly, they should have wide open access to software. In other words, they should be able to say, well, the receivables of this practice look a little bit out of whack. Let's start looking at individual patient letters to see what might be going on. Okay, we can't have sort of a firewall between the people doing the reconciliation and the people in each individual practice. So if you have a multiple office structure,

these are the things you need to start thinking about. One of the members jobs with us is to help people set up their systems in a way that's protected of him. We have a product specifically designed for multiple practice offices. Emma, I don't know if there's anything you want to and be able to share. Yeah, the other thing I'd like to add is, even if you are going to have a separate account for each location, I would also recommend if you are doing insurance electronically,

like direct deposit, that that needs to own separate account as well. So there's one moving part to that, but like you're saying Dave, the main thing is that each location needs to be reconcilable and be able to monitor on a daily weekland monthly basis. Absolutely, thanks. Can we go back to that for one second? I think about that, is that if you're going to be, if you're going to try to measure profitability by location, because I work with orthoronist and a lot of them have multi,

I mean, most of them have multi locations. How do you measure the profitability at one location versus the other location to see where your resources need to be allocated if everything is just going into one bank account and expenses are written now? I mean, you know, you can pull out collection, you put up production and you can plug collection individually of a software, but you can't generate a PNL with expenses on that. If you've got all your expenses all mingled. I'll give a slightly different viewpoint there. I mean, you can, but it means that your accounting system needs to have,

you know, eight different revenue accounts being revenue free each individual branch of your practice and can be allocated. I mean, you can do it, Wendy, but, you know, it gets a lot of support if you can have a bank account that is high to all location. And you can see how much money goes through that account. That makes the profitability picture a lot simpler. Yeah, yeah. I'm all for simple. No, but nine. How does someone know that they are being in bezel to when everything looks normal?

Well, the first question is what exactly is normal? Every practice is different, although they may have similar characteristics, they're different. And what exactly are you looking at? You know, it's the goal of every in best world to make whatever it is you're looking at. Look normal. I've worked on several cases in which if you didn't have. the skills to know what to look for, then you would think everything was normal.

I mean, I won't talk in case of someone who was just stealing money, stealing money out of the deposit to be honest with you. Just purest and fulfilling it, I still have that out of the deposit. But yeah, when I reconcile the practice management software to the bank statement, it may as perfectly. So if I didn't know exactly what to look for, then I wouldn't have known. So it's easy to embeds all and make everything look normal.

Another thing that you need to remember, and I can tell you this is true, 100% from the deepest bottom of my heart, every embezzlement leads to trail. It leads a trail. It depends on if it's where you're looking or where you're not looking. And remember, prosperity always talks about the haigreers.

That's because the association of certified fraud examiners prints out a report to the nation's every single year. And as a certified fraud examiner, I read it every single year and every single year always says the same thing about. And over 90% of the cases that were reported of fraud and investment around the world in every different type of industry, not just industry, not just medical,

not just interest, every industry. Over 90% of those feeds exhibited somewhere between one and three characteristics, behavioral characteristics that we always talk about and we have the investment risk assessment questionnaire for exactly for that purpose. So I'm going to backtrack a little bit and I'm going to say, let's throw out the concept of what looks normal. Financially with our records and let's start looking at what looks normal or abnormal with our behaviors or our employees behaviors.

Is there anything you want to add to that? I'll just kind of echo. I get a lot of calls from people. A lot of people will say to me, you know, I'm speaking at a conference. There's no way I'm being a bezel because my deposit equals my nation every day. And I always tell people there are two ways to invest. There's reconciliation theft and if you're not doing that comparison,

then I can steal from the deposit. I don't, you know, I simply allow the deposit to be a different number than what the reports say it should be. Or if you do that reconciliation, I still want to steal an adult. Then what I need to do is teach your software hungry. And I'm not going to get into a description of how that happens here because we don't do that in public. But if you're a practice owner,

you have questions reach out to us. We're more than happy to have the discussion. We see a lot of reconciliation theft because there are a lot of practices where the doctor doesn't ever look at the amount that you're going to make. And we also see probably a new call amount of kind of concealment types of where somebody's cooking the software. Yep. One thing I want to add to that two, Dave, is going back to the behavior of part of it is, when you ask a question, what's their behavior?

How do they want to answer that question? It can go from a very simple question, like, you know, what's going on with this insurance? Why didn't it cover? So those are some things that just keep note of how or certain people, to everything they appear normal. But when you start asking hard, detailed, specific questions, what type of response are you getting on a regular basis? And we're just going to be a little while I don't know that I'm going to bring back because I thought they were so profound. Whatever said to me was, is, you know, one thing to really watch out for,

I think the words you use the Amber were a lack of transparency. Yeah. You know, you asked somebody a question and you get an obsuscator answer. You know, they give you the three minute answer to the 30 second question. Right. They sort of try, you know, through the middle of the answer to make you forget the question. So I'll just bring those words back because I thought that was a really good way of putting. Yeah.

Okay, we got to go in our will never get finished these. Number 10, what about cameras in my practice? A couple of things I'll say, first of all, you're in the realm of government by state law. So most states allow you to put cameras in your in your practice if you want to record video. The obvious exception is private areas, so we're talking about a restaurant work in a lot of states of gray, home is considered a private area. The question is, can we have hidden cameras in general? No, almost every state requires video surveillance of being used that the people under surveillance be aware.

So that means that you have to tell your staff and also that you need to, you know, have the sign on the front door, so that when the patients come in, they know that they to their under video surveillance. Now, here's the interesting part. It is much easier to record video than audio. And when you record audio, you you fall under a wire to wire tapping or sometimes called use dropping plus. And here's how it works in 39 states they're called one party state. So what that means is that one party to the conversation we can send to the recording. In the other 11 states, they're known as all party states and that requires every single person who's involved in a conversation to consent.

So let's consider a couple of scenarios. You put a camera that records video and audio in your private office. And presumably whatever it's recording is conversations between you and somebody else. So that's okay because you're, you're a party to the conversation and clearly you can send. Second scenario is you put a camera on the different desk that records audio and video. And now that's not okay unless the staff member specifically who's there at the time specifically consent. And realistically that's not going to happen. So what I tell people is if you have video normal, you need to have the audio part report. You can you can capture video without it. If somebody external to the practice like for example, your alarm monitor and company has access to this.

I'm going to consider him that issues because the images of patients are protected under him.

And I will say this, even if it happens to be legally in your state to have hidden cameras, it's a really bad idea. You know, it's not like you see in the Tom Cruise movies where, you know, the cameras the size of, you know, a dime. Permitly not a cameras need infrastructure. So they need a power source. They need to have the way to upload the video to a computer somewhere. Okay, these are a little bulky or then then perhaps your mental features. And if you put those in your practice, sit our leader and what if your employees is going to find them. And just imagine the trust issue fit out when they find them. And the final point is this, Wendy, I'll put you on the spot. How often in your lengthy career with us have you seen a

measurement after it on here? I think I've had several cases where they submitted it, submitted the video of it. But it's not sharp enough to tell exactly what the person is doing. Are they forging a check or are they writing out the reverse realist? Yeah. I've been at this very one years. I've seen somebody caught three times.

So the other problem with cameras is this, if you have an office that's open 35 hours a week, and you have two cameras covering your front desk. Congratulations, you're not shooting in 70 hours of video. Every week, just going to ask you really simple question, where are you going to watch?

So cameras are the murky area. I mean, yes, you can do it. I think person may cameras have other uses in practices. If I were a male dentist treating female patients, for example, I'd probably want a camera in the opposite because if somebody ever claims that I gave them some measures and then broke them, I'm going to be able to show where my hands went and that they never went below the bit. So I think cameras are other purposes. Also, you know, they're a good protection to the front desk. I mean, there are people who will come in your office. If they don't see anybody, the front desk don't walk away with the monitor is there. They're great for that kind of stuff. For a mental mental, pretty close to useless. What insurance covers me if I am in bezel, how do I

claim? Okay, I love talking about insurance, investment in their theft insurance, what everyone doesn't always realize is that you probably most likely do have a theft indemnity clause within the insurance that you have right now with the insurance policy. It's generally called employee dishonesty insurance and it's generally under property theft somewhere in there. The typical coverage is around $25,000. If I were you, my recommendation would be to increase that to a minimum of 75. If not 100 because when it happens, it will be that much when you find it most likely. So in cost you a couple of extra, a couple extra box two increase it for your own safety and peace of mind. Another issue that we work with at Prosperity is

filing insurance claims or helping our clients file insurance claims. This can be quite difficult to do or let me rephrase that. It's not necessarily difficult. It's the amount of information in the type of information that the insurance company requires. It's just flat out ridiculous to be honest with you. It's ridiculous. But they do have a list of certain things that are required. And we'd actually had a question that says, how do you claim from insurance if your receptionist has pocket cash from patients without getting the patients involved? It is my cardinal world as an investigator and I know with Amber and probably the rest of our examiners as well. If I can do whatever I can do or have to do to keep this information out of the hands of my clients

patients and that's what I'm going to do. So to answer your question, if you can track the transactions through your practice management software and there are ways to do that specifically, I don't want to discuss here of course in this public forum. But if you'll send me an email or you want to give me a shout on the phone then we can talk about that. There are definitely ways to do and which you don't have to advise your patients depending on how the money was stolen.

Anyway, so you generally have to have a claim. When you're following an insurance, you have to have a proof of loss form, which has to be completed, a narrative about the loss and master list of losses. And your proof of loss form of course has to be notarized and there are some other highly sensitive areas in there that you have to navigate through. But yes, you do have an insurer employed as honesty insurance coverage. I bet you, I think it's policy out and look at it. You'll find it. That's it for me. Oh, I want to remember that day you've suffered you.

Go ahead, Dave. Oh, or not? All right. Oh, yeah. We'll just talk about bonding for a second. So bonding is another way of getting insurance coverage. When your employees are bonded, it tends to have a much higher one than it's also much more expensive. But what the bonding company will do is actually look at each of your employees do background check to determine whether or not they're bondable. So that's another option that I'll mention to have a conversation with your insurance insurance agent about as a way of covering yourself with that. That's all I have. All right. Question number 12. What are three things I should do each month to protect myself? And this is this is with something I'm passionate about with our office protection system.

I always tell my clients with office protection system the difference is in the detail. So the first thing we talked about is reconcil. So this is where you use your practice management software and you look against your bank statement, merchant accounts like who you see your credit card payments through and third party account. Care credit anything like that. Like we mentioned earlier, just looking at your quick folks versus your bank is not really going to give you those difference in the details with your practice management software to make sure that middle ground is met. This is definitely something. You know that if you want to, it can be outsourced like they talk about with the SOs. But you need to make sure that they have access.

to the reports and the information to do a true reconciliation from your practice management software. The second thing is review your entry logs for your alarm system, who's come in the today's thing close, the week's thing close has anybody come in after hours and logged into your system and changed stuff to be able to change things after you think everything matches and those details are clear and concise.

As we talked about earlier, also if you're doing remote access, you also want to be able to look at who logged into the system after hours after they were closed and how the ability to change that as well. And the second one is reports. You know, it's talked about your bank deposit can match, but bank reports are the deposits that the deposit took off the software can match your banking,

but need to make sure you know how to pull all of the true reports that let you see those details. And you modify transactions, adjustments, anything that was deleted that maybe should have went to your bank, your accounts receivable, what's happening with patient balances, is that being monitored and tracked correctly? So like I said, it's a different system that details. So if you want to protect yourself, make sure you're looking at

reconciliation review and know your software and know your reports. Moving on to our next question, oh, does the practice get long-term and development protection? And what are talks involved? How long does it take and can it be done remotely? We do offer office protection systems. We can access this remotely. And what we do is we look at 25 key points in your software

and your practice and in your banking. And we look for any areas of vulnerability or areas that we want to help you get good policy and procedures in to help you have some financial integrity and safety. The typical cost for a solo practice is $7,000. It usually takes about six to eight weeks to be completed. The main thing here though is as a practice owner in order for you to be protected and safeguarded, you have to be involved for this change and implementation.

We work with you to help teach you what areas you focus on. But that's the real main thing is you have to be involved in implementing that change within the practice. All right, question we got that I think was a great one. When Prosperiardon is working with a doctor, how does their privacy get protected and also that of their patients?

The way we protect users very simple, when we're doing an investigation into self, we go to great lengths to make sure that your staff have no idea that you're taking a look at the practice. That's important whether in Bezelman is happening or not. If it's not happening, you don't want to go to your staff and say, you know what I didn't trust you for a minute or two. I had it on it done, but don't worry, you did fine. That'll make staff meeting Sprossey for the next decade or so.

And there's something is happening. We don't want the thief to see that they're about to get caught because they may do something really desperate. You know, kind of the Inbezzleman equivalent of a Hellmarie class to try to project themselves. In terms of patient privacy, we have wide open answers to your software. So we find what's called a business associated agreement, and that's a privacy document that keeps you compliant under a hip-up. When sharing information with us.

The other thing I'll say because, you know, people ask me sometimes, well, when I give you my data, is it safe? I'm just going to send a shout out here to our IT guys and we have to really really, guys, we run their IT department. Jake Nels is our chief information officer and Shane the slender this is deputy. And the links that those guys have gone to to make our data secure are unbelievable. For example, our servers, not in our head office, our servers are off site in a separate server building. And here's no secret of those guys.

I don't know where it's.

I've never been there. I have a general idea like within a but an eight block radius, but I have no need to know where that stuff is.

So yeah, these guys take the privacy barriers here. So when people ask me this question, I kind of laugh and say, well, you know, realistically our stuff is about 30 times the securing our hands as it is in yours. And usually when I say that, the client says, okay, I'm feeling better about that. We are cross-beerant and I hope Dave Amber and myself represent our company. Well, although we are a bit goofy, I realize and we have fun together. But you know, we are the largest and dental investment firm in the world. That's all we do.

We specialize in that. We have investigators all over the United States and Canada. So we are really a serious business and we take what we do very, very seriously. We specialize in investment investigations for dental practices and dental specialists. And we provide our office protection system, which Amber went over, which is a 25 point review of the policies and procedures within your office to help guard against investment. We also provide litigation support and expert testimony for those individuals that need that.

A few resources that we'll talk about. The first one is us. If you have a question, if there's something you want to talk about, feel free to reach out to us and we're always happy to have that conversation with somebody who says, this is what I'm concerned about or this is what I'd like to do or unbuying a practice and what do I need to worry about there. And we love to have those conversations. The second thing I'm going to mention is that until September 30th, if you want us to help you

with your systems that invest the office protection system product that each of Amber Wendy mentioned in the last couple of minutes, contact us. And the other thing I'll mention is COVID has taken a bit of a bite of of your cash loan. When I say if there I'm really mean because we're allowing people to to plan as our products. So we we give payment terms to make them afford it and that's so on. And the final thing is if you like what we do, we would love you forever if you left us a Google review. We really don't ask for anything in these webinars at all. It's just really a lot of giving around you than receiving. But if you if you like us.

say we love your friend. And we'll tackle maybe a few questions. I see we're very close to time. So we might have time for two. The one question that I got is this. Somebody said there are some insurance companies that pay by putting money on a credit card and what we do is we take that credit card and we run it to our merchant mission. I'm going to say a couple of things about this. I'm going to say really expensive way to get paid because now the merchant term all is going to take their fee from which could be two and a half percent of the

second thing is there are all kinds of ways that this can turn into fun. So what I recommend you do is if you haven't insurance company doing that by law they can't pay. They can't control you to be paid that way. Just stop it. Tell them the way of paying me by check or put the money in my account but no more of this replenishing the credit card. As I say you're paying two and a half percent for the insurance company for absolutely enough. So let's kill that one. I think there was one or two of questions maybe that we wanted to bring out. Amber. Oh sorry Dave I had a question someone had asked is it okay to use a triplicate receipt book or cash? Of course it is but what you have to remember about a receipt book is this they sell them at an office fee book. So you can you can

buy your receipt book and if I'm a thief then I don't want to use your receipt book. I'll go get my own.

receipt fair really the solution to the problem here. Okay the the real solution to the problem is you at the end of the day looking at your day and report and saying okay that patient was in and did they pay? Did they pay their contract? You know if our office policy is that we collect copies then was it collected and that's a part of the day that level of analysis that cognizance of what happened today is far more important than falling around the receipt books because a receipt just a piece of paper and you know if I want to give the patient a receipt that says $800 and have the duplicate and the triplicate in the receipt books. They have $1000 I can make that happen. Okay for trees not hard. So great questions but I'm not sure that's going to that's going to

solve any problem for you. Remember that it's fine to make rules but then your staff have to follow and if you have somebody who's an investor they're not going to feel any particular compulsion to follow your rules. Here's a question Dave when I've called for references the only information I use the receipt is confirmation of the date of employment. Previous employers are hesitant to answer anything else because they cannot be certain that the person calling is not related to the former employees who is checking up on what is said about them therefore opening themselves up to defamation of characters. The only question I now ask is would they hire them again? Sometimes even that isn't helpful. What specifically should you ask when checking references?

That is a fantastic question. The first thing I'd say is that what I would offer the person at the other end is look I'm Dr. Salon so if you want to look at my number on Google and then call me back I'm happy for you to do that. So let's eliminate the fear that the other side has that they're really talking to the applicant system. The other thing you can say to this person is you understand that this person may be denied employment with me because you are not prepared to answer this question. Now that's plain a little bit hurtful with the former employer but what they're hearing in their mind is okay so if I don't answer these questions and this person doesn't get the job they're going to suit me for not answering the question. In other words you can you know if somebody

scared about being sued play into it so I would do that but that would you be hired question and if somebody's reluctant to answer what I would tell them is you understand that I'm asking a question about your future plans that can't be disamaged. Okay so if you get stuck there you have some things you can do but yeah you know I reassure them or give them the means to confirm that they're actually talking with you and not the applicant's sister and tell them that that's a safe question to answer and furthermore you know tell them that if they don't answer may result in this person not getting work just to refresh people on something we talked about before when we talked about hiring a legitimate without malice conversation between a former

employer and a perspective employer can almost never be defameter okay you would really have to work at it to make that into defamation and a lot of states actually make that conversation with called qualified subject to qualified privilege so it's it's kind of in the same lines as a conversation you have with your attorney it can't be compelled in the court so it's normally again as long as it's without malice it's normally safe to get truthful information help it is always safe to get truthful information about a partner play and answering the question we need to be hired this person can't be true or false I mean there no that that question is this not subject to the true false test anyway all right well guys we are probably a little longer than we hoped but

Wendy's Wendy's turtles were right on the money we wanted to take some time today and you know give kind of thorough answers to some fantastic questions so we hope this was valuable and formative maybe you'd mildly entertaining for people all right ladies and gentlemen thank you very much have a great night be safe be well and we'll see you in a little more fun bye bye guys

thanks for listening to the dental practice owners podcast brought to you by Prosperidant you can contact Prosperidant through its website www.pressperidant.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