Keep your eye on the register!
Some people underestimate the magnitude of damage a person can do to ruin a business venture. Even the smallest employee who has his or her hand in the cookie jar can run a business to the ground, with you realizing only when it’s too late – even a lowly cashier who pockets money from the till can cost you a lot, even more so when a person who has a lot of authority decides to screw you over, the results can be exponentially devastating.
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It’s not unheard of for expats here to put up local businesses. There’s a lot to love about Thailand – the people, the food, the culture – which makes it a great place to get a vacation and / or settle down for (possibly early) retirement. And who wouldn’t mind some extra income?
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Sometimes though, these businessmen make the wrong choice of employee, and / or do not employ enough safeguards to keep their interests safe. If you own a business personally, there’s really no one to watch over things except you.
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I recall an incident where we were called on to investigate case where a local business was suddenly being in trouble with the government for failure to pay taxes for a significant amount of time. The company was owned by an expat, and he entrusted the running of a business to his business manager, who was in charge of the bookkeeping. It seemed to be doing well for a while, so you cannot imagine his shock when he received notice that he owed the government a lot of money in back taxes. When he looked to the business manager for an explanation, he was nowhere to be found.
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At this point, we were employed to track him down and find out his whereabouts. We were eventually successful in finding after some time – when someone with a lot of money decides to go into hiding, it’s an extremely difficult task to find him.
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When you think of it though, the whole fiasco could be prevented if the business owner decided to put in a few safeguards in his business operations to avoid such incidents from happening.
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- Background checks – especially if you’re going to trust someone with a lot of responsibility, wouldn’t it pay to find out if you should be trusting this person in the first place?
- Computer monitoring software – most financial transactions nowadays are made electronically, so with the right monitoring software, you can easily monitor computer activity, especially in sections / departments that handle sensitive material.
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It was really fortunate that we caught the guy, but what if we hadn’t? No matter how hard we try to pursue every lead, the outcome is never guaranteed. No PI business can guarantee perfect results all the time. As they say, prevention is indeed the best cure, so it would have been better if the business owner spent some extra effort securing his business to prevent any problems in the future.
January 16th, 2010 at 11:32
Hey, good web site you have here! Very informative and the stories are engrossing. Anyway, I really have to agree with what you are saying here. I’m not based in Thailand, I just came across your site while researching for a vacation me and my wife are doing there. As a small business owner myself, I can really relate to what you’re saying here, which is not only applicable to the Thailand setting, but to all businesses in general. When you trust someone with the books, then you should be sure that he or she does not have a history of stealing.
January 17th, 2010 at 23:32
A background check cannot really confirm whether or not you can trust a person. There’s always a first time, as the saying goes. But with systems in place like the computer monitoring, and maybe even CCTV cameras in place, they sure will combine to a great preventive measure that will discourage would ne crooks to, at the very least, take their dirty business elsewhere. In the end, there’s really no one you can trust, except maybe family, to take care of things for you unsupervised. Otherwise, you always need to have some safety net to catch you when things go wrong.
January 18th, 2010 at 15:33
jerrys: Thank you for the compliment. Yes, it’s really important to have the right person to handle things if you don’t want to be bothered by the details of managing the business. But as we mentioned, it’s easy to take advantage, so you need to have preventive measures that will deter any kind of abuse.
grandfinale: It’s true that a background check can’t confirm for sure that a person will steal, but its a great aid in knowing more about a person. Would you hire someone who has a checkered past to manage your books and / or your business? People aren’t exactly forthcoming about any past misdemeanours, so you need to know upfront it they can be trusted.