Business enterprises should be seen to be taking robust action against wrongdoers, this sends the right signals and discourages further wrongdoing.
In the process of analysing wrongdoing to effectively combat crime, a business should expound on its risk analysis to adequately understand why proprietors would be tempted or intentionally plan to commit crime that targets their assets. This enables the business mitigate appropriately against likely crime indicators and scenarios.
Here are some reasons to analyse in order for a business to understand why people (insiders & outsiders) commit crime:-
1. Rules – How are the rules? Unclear and poorly communicated rules, not enforced or accepted practices are tolerated. The employee has not been effectively inducted.
2. Opportunities – Are there are opportunities that create temptation? Valuable assets have to be accessible to employees and customers in order for business to take place. There is a great scope for fraud and embezzlement. Thieves see this as a way to generate extra benefits. Ready markets also stimulate opportunities.
3. Disaffection – Are there levels of disaffection? Employees, for whatever reason are generally disaffected with their employer or there is no loyalty.
4. Disparities and perceived discrimination – Are there huge and resented disparities between working conditions, salaries, hours worked, promotion opportunities etc? Discrimination may take place and employees’ envy of others may develop into jealousy.
5. Personal financial situation – What’s your employee financial situation? An employee may be in debt and sees the company as means to relieve the debt, or may be living above his means.
6. Company situation – What’s the current company’s situation like? Perpetrators usually exploit assets of companies which are believed to be heading towards insolvency.
7. Employment stability – Is the state of employment within your business stable? Those warned for redundancy, planning to resign, or who have ambitions outside their present employment may be more tempted to steal.
8. Ineffective detection, investigation and punishment – Are perpetrators likely to be caught, and if so, are they likely to be punished too? What’s the severity of the punishment?
9. Big company syndrome – Is your business a big company? The perception that it is a big company with big pockets, spending huge sums of money here and there, so taking small items isn’t really theft.
10. Boundaries – What are the company boundaries? The perception that it isn’t wrong. For example the majority of people at the workplace still insist that using personal hard drives is alright .However the same personal hard drives are used to copy and steal business data.
11. Weak protection – How is your business security protection status? There are flaws in the management supervision or flaws in security programme, which may be based on the perceptions, strengths and preferences of the security focal point (security manager etc) and not a detailed crime risk analysis.
12. Upbringing – What’s your employee upbringing? The perpetrator has been conditioned by his upbringing by either his family, friends, community, environment to have poor moral values.
13.Self – esteem and peer pressure – Are your employees under peer pressure? The crime is committed to raise self-esteem or to impress peers.
14. Infiltration – Is your business exposed to infiltration? The person may have been infiltrated, or fallen under the influence of outside criminals.
15. Background screening – Does your business conduct background checks? Lack of an effective background screening programme.
Upon understanding these reasons a business is able to mitigate through encompassing of the elements of environment design, physical, procedural and human measures in its security risk mitigating programmes that should include and not limit :-
1. Implementation of capable guardians – These should not be restrictive to security measures, but also to good design of the environment by creating natural surveillance and territorial ownership.
2. Breaking monotonous routines – Sometimes opportunities for crime arise when adversaries get too familiar and accustomed to the operational routines. Break the routine through rotational shifts, facilitating timely staff leaves, system random checks etc
3. Employee socialisation – Condition new employees to instinctively and subconsciously appreciate the elements that include the rules, values, culture and expectations of the business. This is best achieved through means of an ethical code and business principles.
4. Employee screening – Incorporate mandatory background checks for all employees to weed out those with criminal tendencies.
5. Vendor vetting – While this vetting process is imperative to effectively manage risk and ensure quality service delivery, it also protects your business against criminal exposure by helping filter out vendors with malicious intentions such as fraudulent acts of money laundering or related organised criminal activities.