#EqualPayDay

Yesterday, April 12, 2016 was Equal Pay Day. All sorts of news stories have been posted about this phenomenon and how people agree to disagree. But in the world of embezzlement and fraud I can tell you some even more depressing statistics. Statistic #1-depending on the position, women have an even bigger glass ceiling. In 2016 women stole approximately .56 for every dollar stolen by a male. Statistic #2-breaking it down by position and comparing male and female employees the women steal approximately .78 cents of a man. Comparing managers, the female managers steal approximately .84 cents. But the biggest variance is between owners and executives. This is where the men rule.  A woman will only steal, on average, .36 as compared to a man. Below is the link for the ACFE Report to the Nations 2016-see page 58 for gender:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/acfepublic/2016-report-to-the-nations.pdf

So what does that say? Anecdotally I will say that women are in “lesser” positions than men on average and therefore have more supervision. If you are a male owner/executive you are going to rob the company blind.   As it has been detailed before, audits do not catch fraud generally speaking. But more positions that are held by women have some internal controls: two signature authorization, limits on purchase cards etc.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce, has worked to achieve parity in his employees once he was made aware of the discrepancies in salaries. I believe as women move up the employment ladder we will see bigger losses.  I say when they get in the higher echelons of business they will steal more. Dr. Freda Adler once told me she was waiting to see the Bernice Madoff. It will just be a matter of time she said. I agree with her. Women are making strides in the embezzlement statistics.