It has been said that to stop a thief one must think like a thief. One who follows that advice may be surprised to learn how little thought the typical employee thief gives to planning the theft.
Experts generally agree that remarkably little white collar crime results from a clever plan.
Most take the form of a simple exploitation of an obvious weakness. While prosecuted cases may not be representative of all cases, the simplicity of most employee fraud is also borne out by the survey of CPAs mentioned earlier. As Table 1 shows, nearly all of the 261 cash frauds reported in that survey involved such old fashioned techniques as failing to record sales, misappropriating receivables collections, creating fictitious payables or customer refunds, making unauthorized loans, falsifying petty cash disbursements, and overstating payroll. Obviously, surveys of fraud techniques are limited to fraud that has been discovered. No one but the perpetrators know the techniques of undiscovered fraud, and they may very well be sophisticated.