If the employee is fired, as happens in most cases, the supervisor must then recruit, hire and train a replacement. Moreover, the whole office can be thrown under a cloud during such an investigation. Word gets out that there has been an investigation. All of a sudden, lots of people in the department are suspect. Morale drops tremendously.
Production goes down, too.
The other side of it is for a few hundred bucks, people throw away great careers at the university, retirement benefits. That's really sad to see that occur. When Gregg became internal auditor in 1986, the campus was conducting about four investigations a year into employee misuse of resources. With the statewide budget cuts in the early 1990s, the number of cases jumped to their current level of about 15 a year. I think initially when the university was trying to cut budgets, and everyone was facing layoffs and the fear of layoff, tolerance went way down.