When your office manager steals, a doctor learns the hard way

January 14, 2009

The office manager of a physician practice plays a vital role, and is trusted with a tremendous amount of private and financial information.

One doctor learns how her office manager has been routinely stealing from the practice, to the tune of almost $50,000.

“I had read countless times about victims of office embezzling, but that was always in large medical groups,” writes Dr. Miriam Griggs, the victimized physician. She took false comfort in her solo practice in which she mistakenly thought “was exempt from the formal office policies and procedures needed to prevent such catastrophes.”

Doctors need to have intimate knowledge of the financial status of a practice. Not doing so can make one vulnerable to this type of embezzlement.



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{ 1 comment }

1 Anonymous January 14, 2009 at 7:07 am

This is very common in all small offices.

With a crumbling economy you can expect more of it.

It’s also a good idea to keep your toys under wraps. Pulling into the parking lot in your new BMW and talking about this and that you’re doing or buying makes it easy to rationalize stealing from you.

We had a receptionist who cobbled together dozens of credit cards from personal info. We didn’t find out until we went to refinance and our score was bad.

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