Practice Management Alert

Question: What are some basic procedures our practice can implement to guard ourselves against employee embezzlement?

Kentucky subscriber

Answer: In an ideal world, you’d be able to trust all your employees completely. But embezzlement is a very real and potentially very costly problem, and the sooner you detect it, the lower the cost to you. Michelle Ann Richards recommends the following employee embezzlement prevention ideas:

• Account for imprest balances daily. Another name for imprest balance is the “petty cash” your practice receives when patients pay their co-pays and deductibles with cash. If you don’t check balances daily, it’s too easy for dishonest employees to skim off the top.
• Have separate receipts for cash, check, and credit cards.
• Have each employee double-check another employee on staff. Fraud prevention experts call this move “segregation of duties.” Such structures create built-in checks and balances to prevent fraud.
• Rotate who tallies overall deposits. When one person does the same back office job all the time, built-in checks and balances fall by the wayside. Rotate these duties, and be suspicious of any employee who never ever wants to take a vacation.
• Collect co-pays and back balances at time of service.