Most dental embezzlers steal from one practice. Serial embezzlers steal from many — moving from victim to victim, refining their methods, and exploiting the same systemic vulnerabilities again and again. In this revealing episode, Prosperident's David Harris, Wendy Askins, and Amber Weber profile the serial embezzlers they have encountered in their investigative work and extract the lessons these cases contain for every dental practice owner.

Serial embezzlers are the most sophisticated and the most damaging offenders in the dental embezzlement landscape. Understanding how they operate, what they look for, and why they are so consistently successful is one of the most valuable things a dental practice owner can do to protect themselves.

Topics covered include:

• What distinguishes a serial embezzler from a one-time offender
• The profiles and patterns the Prosperident team has observed across serial cases
• How serial embezzlers identify and select vulnerable practices
• The methods they use to steal — and the concealment strategies they rely on
• Why serial embezzlers are so rarely caught early
• How they move between practices after discovery and what enables them to do so
• The role of inadequate reference checking and background screening in perpetuating serial theft
• The systemic vulnerabilities that serial embezzlers consistently exploit
• What practice owners can do to avoid becoming the next victim in a serial embezzler's career

The most important insight from this episode: serial embezzlers are not unusually clever — they succeed because most practices give them everything they need. Close those gaps, and they will move on.

To protect your practice, visit www.prosperident.com, www.dentalembezzlement.com, or call 888-398-2327. Schedule a consultation at www.prosperident.com/meetwithdavid.

Auto-generated transcript: Steal and Conceal; What Serial Embezzlers Can Teach Us

You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests.

So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber. Wendy Askins and David Harris. Please talk about the issues that matter to you. You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners.

The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests. So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber. Wendy Askins and David Harris. Talk about the issues that matter to you. I am thrilled to be here with my two terrific co-hosts, Amber Weber and Wendy Askins, both from Texas.

Amber is a senior fraud examiner with us. She's been with Prosperident for about two years. And her area of focus is investigations, and also something we'll probably touch on a little bit later called Office Protection System, which is where we help people protect their practices. And my other co-hosts also from Texas are actually our longest serving examiner, Wendy Askins.

Wendy heads our orthodonic department, and also does a fair amount of work in orthodonic pediatric practices, but she has really seen every corner of Prosperident and has a huge amount of expertise. So terrific to be back with you both again, and with our audience. So today we've got a really neat topic. We're going to talk about serial and bezels.

And by serial and bezels, I mean people who steal in one practice and get caught and get fired, and then miraculously two weeks later, they're working across the street or across town. And they do it repeatedly in some cases many, many times. So we're going to talk a little bit about that group and what we can learn from them, and there are a lot of good lessons here. Hey, Steve. Well, you know, we are cross faired it,

and we are the largest dental and bezels meant to perform in the entire world. So we're also accounting geeks as well as investigators. So we love to know what the statistics are about, how and bezels meant isn't practically our dental industry. So what we know is that in 2019 ADA published their study, and I was a study of self reporting of how many of ADA members have been impacted by investment within their career.

So they're self reporting. And what they found was that 53% of the participants in the survey, recorded that they weren't quite sure that it didn't bezels or not. They didn't, they said that they just really didn't know. But what is absolutely fascinating for us as investigators is that 47% of their recordings had indicated that they had been a bezels from. And have a little bit under half of that, 47% had actually been in bezels from more than once.

I mean, look up here for the four or more times, 8% of the respondents had said that they had been in bezels from four or more times. That's absolutely just blows our mind. It's completely outstanding. But what we also know about in bezels is that there is a recidivism rate for people that invests or what we call serial investors. So what's the difference between someone who is just stealing? This is their first occurrence of stealing from your practice versus a serial investor

that goes around cannibalizing other dental practices. James, going to talk about that in a little bit. We don't actually know this statistics for the recidivism rate. What we do know for all offenders or incarcerated offenders in general is that 77% of individuals within incarcerated and released 77% of them, reoffend or will be arrested within five years of their negative consequences that were imposed because of their negative actions. So 77% is approximately what we can expect of the dental industry as well.

We got you now. Okay, now I'm sorry. So the next question is, is a bevelment gender specific? Our branded investigator Kelly Paxon has kind of coined this phrase of pink collar crime. Because a dentistry and a lot of professions that are care oriented such as nursing dentistry and child care, we have seen an increase in female and bevelers by 40%. However, in bevelment by males have only increased about 4% since 1990. One of those mean reasons is males may and bevel from dental practices,

but the administrative positions in our pink collar career are overwhelming we see males. So that's an interesting statistic about if an endovalment is gender specific. Yeah, and Amber, we get asked the question a lot because when you see our slideshow, they're predominantly females and relatively few males. So sometimes people ask me to do males in bezel and I think you answered the question, they absolutely do, but it's just a factor of how few of them work in administrative positions in dentistry versus how many females. Correct. So let's meet a serial and beveler and there she is.

Whenever I give you a serial and beveler's name, I stumble a little bit because they have many names. And this lady has gone by Lisa George, Lisa Jurgen, a different spelling of Lisa, another different spelling of Lisa. She lives in my hometown, which is Halifax Canada. And she said Dennis, and it didn't stop with Dennis. She has been known to rent expensive apartments, and then be unable to pay the rent, and just kind of fight eviction for as long as she can. She's also set up some phony businesses and nailed a couple of banks.

I've had the occasion to fire her at least once. She claims a lot of education that she doesn't have, including that she has finished or in some cases, has almost finished her law degree. She has always well dressed, very polished in her grammar and speech, looks professional. She's really well, knows practice, management software, really well. And the only thing that's really interrupted her stealing is some visits to the Krobar hotel. She's been charged in last time I counted with 110 counts of fraud, and has served 32 months in jail.

But when she gets out, what does she do? She goes back to what she knows best, which is working in Dell practices. So that's our adversary here. We're going to talk a little bit more about the personality characteristics of that adversary and maybe how to recognize them a bit better. But this is who we're dealing with. We meet two interesting groups at Prosperidan. The first group is the serial and bezels who we're talking about tonight.

The second group we refer to is the million dollar club. This is a thief who has stolen more than a million dollars from their practice. Here's one of each. T

Letting an employee go is one of the most dreaded tasks in dental practice management. Done poorly, it exposes you to legal liability, damages team morale, and can even escalate a difficult situation. Done well, it protects your practice, preserves your reputation, and closes the chapter cleanly. In this practical, candid episode, Prosperident's David Harris and Amber Weber share everything you need to know about ending the employment relationship — including the questions submitted by their audience.

This episode covers the full spectrum of employee separations: voluntary resignations, performance-based terminations, and the especially sensitive scenario of terminating someone you suspect — or have confirmed — has been stealing from you. Each situation requires a different approach, and the Prosperident team covers them all.

Topics covered include:

• The legal landscape around employee termination and what you must know before acting
• How to prepare for a termination conversation to minimize risk and conflict
• What to say — and what never to say — when letting someone go
• How to handle the immediate aftermath: access, accounts, systems, and team communication
• Terminating a suspected or confirmed embezzler: special considerations and sequencing
• The risk of wrongful termination claims and how to protect yourself
• How to handle references for departed employees going forward
• What to do when a departing employee turns hostile or threatening
• Audience Q&A: real situations submitted by dental practice owners

One of the most important things practice owners can do after discovering embezzlement is terminate the employee correctly. This episode ensures you know how.

To speak with Prosperident about your practice, visit www.prosperident.com, www.dentalembezzlement.com, or call 888-398-2327. Schedule a consultation at www.prosperident.com/meetwithdavid.

Auto-generated transcript: Breaking Up is Hard To Do; Ending the Employment Relationship

You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests.

So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber, Wendy Askins, and David Harris. Please talk about the issues that matter to you. You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners.

The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests. So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber, Wendy Askins, and David Harris, talk about the issues that matter to you. Our Prosperident, Howard Howard Howard Howard Howard Howard. Talking about today, breaking up is hard to do, and any relationship business or personal.

So today, that is what we want to give you information about. I'm Amber Weber, Senior Fraud of Dammiter with Prosperident. I'm joined with my co-host CEO of Prosperident, Dave Harris. We want to remind you to remember that today is not a substitute that's up to for your human resource expert. You need to really make sure you know your specific state and your current situation before you make decisions to terminate or let somebody go.

Thank you, Amber, and great to be with you. And I just want also say hello to our community inside of the audience. A lot of the presentation is designed primarily for US clients, but we are going to touch on the Canadian context and a lot of the things we say will be applicable in both places. So things are changing right now.

And the big thing that's changing is this, six months ago what I heard from a lot of you was we're having a tough time finding good staff. Unemploymentist is low and people have lots of options for jobs and sometimes we're really settling as opposed to getting what we want. Right now in the US and Canadian numbers are that different.

The unemployment rate is 14.7%. Six months ago it was more like 4%. So what that means is right now, there are lots of good people looking for jobs. And the implication for you is that if you have some staff where really you settle over there's somebody who you've wanted to get rid of, but you just didn't think you can replace them.

Suddenly you're in the world of choice. That also means something to the people being fired. Six months ago, if you fired somebody, most of them probably said it's not a big deal because I can more or less walk across the street, probably get more money. Now they're going to join that 14% and being fired is going to be a much greater problem.

And we can expect these people to push back. So that means that doing it right and that's what we're going to talk about today, is going to be important. Good news, webinars. We've talked about systems for smart hiring. And today what we want to focus on is systems for smart firing.

So a lot of people think, well, when I'm done, I'm done. I'm ready to terminate this relationship. I can tell that staff member is no longer working out and they can just walk out the door and it's the done. So the key thing here is, really, specifically, you have to have a system. Why?

Well, what can go wrong? Here's an effective example of an employee who was terminated for in-veglement. After this termination had happened, this employee still had control of the practices Facebook page. Obviously, there was some animosity towards the practice. So this employee took it into their own hands

to make a post on Facebook to publicly cause problems with the office. This employee made a post about how the doctor had had chronic substance abuse problems from cocaine and methamphetamines. And his malpractice insurance had expired because of that and the office was forced to close the doors. For other more, the employee went on to say,

if you felt like you had been treated by this doctor, or if he was under the influence, please contact the dental board and file a complaint. And on a final note, this employee also said, if you have any future appointment, we recommend that you cancel the appointment. So this was complete public. We don't have viral everything goes now.

This practice was impacted immensely just because the system hadn't been taken place to make sure that the practice was safeguarded. So none of this was true. This was simply a guide to getting fired and the mad and deciding, I'm gonna wreck my boss's practice. And as Amber says, the opportunity was left there

because the practice didn't properly lock down when they fired him. All right. So another example is staff members who become personally involved with you. Here's a great example. This doctor had a staff member that has been sick. And the doctor offered to drive them to the local pharmacy to help the staff member out.

After the staff member was let go, obviously the staff member made many claims that there was discrimination that had happened. The doctor had racial discrimination and had made sexual advances towards the staff member. And when the staff member refused, that is why they were terminated. The key here is there was no witness

and the doctor had taken gotten into a personal relationship and spent personal time with his patient one-on-one. Sorry, with the staff member one-on-one with no protections for them, it was all here say. But the staff member was able to make this claim. We don't know what really happened here. There are only two people in the planet who know why I'm. But the mistake that was made was that

Dr. Kim put himself in a position where this kind of allegation could be made. And that just didn't need to happen. And we'll talk more specifically about that in a minute. The main thing is we talked about my heart hiring. And why you need to have that pre-screen process in place. The same goes. After that employee has entered your door, it's still a system.

Your human resource system goes on forever. So you need to make sure you have those building blocks in place. Whether it's a good experience or not. So once you think, you need to make sure you have a very detailed deployment manual, detailed job description, secure personnel file, regular honest performance reviews, and write-ups. Otherwise, no-one is progressive discipline. The reason is that key is when you go to make a relationship, you have that

foundation built with your staff and your other team members that this is part of the standard of your office that you have those building blocks. And when you go for that final breaking up, every set in place, it allows you to do it in a structure

Bank reconciliation sounds mundane. In the context of dental embezzlement, it is one of the most powerful theft-prevention tools available — and one of the most commonly neglected. In this episode, Prosperident's Amber Weber, Wendy Askins, and David Harris walk through the core financial safeguards every dental practice must have in place, explaining clearly what should be done by staff, what should be outsourced, and what the practice owner must personally own.

The title captures the choice every dental practice owner makes by default: either you reconcile your accounts regularly with appropriate oversight, or you are operating recklessly — and leaving the door open for theft that may not be discovered for years. This episode explains exactly how to choose reconciliation.

Topics covered include:

• Why bank reconciliation is the single most important embezzlement deterrent available to practice owners
• How to reconcile practice accounts correctly and what to look for
• The frequency and format of reconciliation that provides meaningful protection
• Which financial tasks can be safely delegated to staff — and which cannot
• When and how to use outsourced bookkeeping or accounting services
• The financial oversight tasks that only the practice owner should perform
• How embezzlers exploit practices that skip or superficially perform reconciliation
• The role of your practice management software in financial oversight
• Building a monthly financial oversight routine that provides real protection in under an hour

The dentists who are hardest to steal from are not the ones with the most sophisticated systems — they are the ones who consistently do the basics. This episode tells you exactly what those basics are.

To learn more about protecting your practice, visit www.prosperident.com, www.dentalembezzlement.com, or call 888-398-2327. Schedule a consultation at www.prosperident.com/meetwithdavid.

Auto-generated transcript: Reconcile or Reckless - You Decide!

You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests. So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber, and listen to Prosperident's and let's listen to the videos I mean,

Ph.D., when they ask us and David Harris talk about the issues that matter to you. You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, guests. So sit back, relax and listen to

prosperity, amber, weather, Wendy Askins, and David Harris. Talk about the issues that matter to you. Good day to all family. Thank you for joining us for the prosperity and C.B.

19 webinar series. This particular webinar is going to talk about reconcile or reckless. You decide which one you want to be. I'm joined today by Amber, the amazing amber. The first day said in our beloved CEO, prosperity, David Harris.

And with that, you can take it away, David. Let's start with a couple of definitions. And I don't think you're going to find these in the dictionary anywhere, but these are the way we're going to talk about fixed.

So we talk about two different activities. And one is balancing and balancing is what's left. And you can see what it's trying to do. The primary purpose is to make sure that the bank deposit agrees with. And I assume we all know this, but I'll say, PMS here refers to practice management software,

not the other thing. So we want to make sure that the deposit agrees with the software and that no treatment has been missed or left out. And there are also some procedures that staff do at the end of a month to close that month out in your software and elsewhere. So when we talk about balancing, we're talking about the staff activities. And when we talk about reconciliation,

we're talking about normally to practice on, and in some cases in a really large practice, this might be the office manager who's doing this stuff. And also some things that could be outsourced. So here we're talking about the supervision of the activities as opposed to doing them. And we're not really intending here to teach doctors how to do their staff job,

because that'll just make a huge mess in every practice. What we're really talking about is how to supervise that job. And that's going to be a lot of our focus today. And really, Brian terms, there are two kinds of investment. And the first one, I call reconciliation death. So this happens if either there's no reconciliation being done in a practice, or there is, but it's incomplete or it's ineffective. If I'm a staff member and I realize that nobody other than me

is taking an interest in whether the bank deposit blinds up with the practice management software, stealing is really easy. All I do is short the bank deposit. So the practice management software says that $2,400 should be going in the bank today. And I deposit some lower number. This is easy theft.

And it happens when there's no oversight. If the balancing activity is supervised, now what I have to do is what I call concealment theft. And that means that I have to do something to individual patient accounts, so that today looks like it's going to balance. This is a lot more sophisticated. So I guess what I'll say is really the primary purpose

of that oversight or reconciliation process. If I can be a little fesciest about it, is to weed out the stupid thieves or the lazy ones. And make it so that at a minimum, if somebody's going to steal from you, they have to work a little higher at it. One thing I want to tackle specifically is that I hear a lot of doctors when they call me initially, and they're talking to me about the possibility

that their practice is being enveloped. And one thing they say to me is, but I protect myself because I take the deposit to the bank myself. And I could tell you that that activity is not nearly as valuable as people think it is. The question I ask a lot of these doctors next to kind of some of them is, okay, but how do you know that the amount that you left the practice with was the right amount?

And that's where the shoulders kind of get shrugged, and somebody's at all, I guess when you put it that way. To me, it's what's more important than who carries the money to the bank is that the practice owner can confirm that the amount that left the practice was the right amount. And the amount that showed up at the bank was the right amount. So you don't need to do the deposit to do that. All you need to do is have online making,

and have a concept of what the right amount should have been. And that's what we're going to talk about with you minutes.

The other danger I'm going to caution people on is relying on daily data and not looking at monthly data.

I know a lot of doctors, for example, who will look at the merchant account. And the merchant account just to make sure everybody knows what we're talking about is that the facility in the practice for incoming credit card payments. So that's why we're shooting at half, that's tied to the merchant account. So people will look at the daily tape from the merchant account and compare the interest of the practice management software. And if those two line up as far as they're concerned, they're fine. The problem is your practice is not open 24 hours a day,

and it's not open seven days a week. In fact, right now it's probably not open at all, in normal times. So you can look at a tape that comes out of that machine and balance it to the practice management software. And then somebody else can... come in and do more transactions and then. So we really need to look at monthly stuff as well as daily stuff because things can happen outside of when the practice is open. So there's

a definite danger in daily in relying on daily stuff. So let's say back to about 30 years ago, it used to be a lot more simple when we needed to track what happened in our business on a daily monthly basis. This makes me think back to my first job I had, helping at a restaurant back in the 80s, where you swipe the credit card and you thought you were really cool because you were running that swipe and at the end of the day all of the different types of payments that you had received were separated in a paper amount, you know, your seats for credit cards cash, check

The majority of dental embezzlements are preventable — and most can be traced back to a single failure point: inadequate screening at the time of hiring. In this episode, the Prosperident team introduces the concept of forensic hiring: approaching the recruitment and screening process with the same rigor and skepticism that investigators bring to a case — specifically to uncover what an applicant would prefer you never find out.

Every embezzler was hired. And in nearly every case Prosperident has investigated, warning signs existed in the applicant's background that a more thorough hiring process would have surfaced. This episode is designed to close that gap.

Topics covered include:

• Why standard hiring practices leave most dental practices dangerously exposed
• What "forensic hiring" means and how it differs from conventional recruitment
• The specific categories of background information that matter most for dental hiring
• How to conduct reference checks that go beyond the rehearsed recommendation
• What criminal background checks do and don't reveal — and how to supplement them
• Credit checks: when they are appropriate, what they reveal, and legal considerations
• Social media and online research as part of a hiring investigation
• Red flags in applications, interviews, and references that experienced embezzlers work to hide
• Interview questions and techniques designed to surface honesty and integrity
• How to structure your hiring process so that candidates with problematic histories self-select out

The goal of forensic hiring is not to assume every applicant is dishonest — it is to ensure that if someone has a history that should disqualify them, you find it before they're on your payroll.

To learn more about embezzlement prevention and investigation, visit www.prosperident.com, www.dentalembezzlement.com, or call 888-398-2327. Schedule a consultation at www.prosperident.com/meetwithdavid.

Auto-generated transcript: Forensic Hiring - Finding Out What an Applicant Doesn't Want You to Know

You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests. So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber, and Amber Weber,

and listen to the first time you've seen the video. You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests. So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber,

Wendy Askins, and David Harris, talk about the issues that matter to you. I'd like to introduce my terrific co-host today. First of all, I'll introduce Amber Weber, who's one of our senior examiners. In fact, she's our newest, most newly promoted senior examiners. She's from Bluff, Bell, Texas.

Amber works with us in front investigation, and also in what's called office protection system, which is our protection package for dentists. And my other co-host today is the Splendifer, as Wendy Askins also from Texas. Wendy is our longest serving examiner, and she's one of three supervising examiners. So that's the most senior level of examiner that we have.

Wendy's particular concentration is front investigation in orthodonic practices, and she knows more about that than really anybody else on the planet. So you may see a little bit of a bad flavor coming through today. And I'd also like to send a shout out to my friend, Jan Keller, who's a consultant, and she was really the first person to use the title for anti-ciring in dentistry.

So I just want to acknowledge that, and thank Jan for generously allowing us to use that title. And the final thing I'll say is, we're not age-art advisors. And we're not here to tell you how to find the best person. You know, that ideal person who's the perfect fit for your practice who projects the personality of your practice exactly the way you want to do. What we are really ultimately as professional cynics,

and we get to see people who we call serial and buzzers. And these are the ones who get caught stealing in one practice. And two weeks later, they're working more or less across the street. And what we want to do is show you their tricks, and help you come up with a plan to not be victimized by those people. And there's a lot of investment that is preventable if the hiring is done properly. And I'm going to highlight one serial in Bezler now.

And she's got a lot of names, unique wells, Denise LaLam, or yet men, all kinds of variations. Unique has, and I'll cover unique for purposes of this discussion. She's worked a lot in the Las Vegas and Phoenix areas. And we've probably heard from 20 different practices about her. Most of you know that we have a place in our website called the Hall of Shame, where we profile on Bezler's. And of course, you can't say page there.

I described her as the chameleon, because the resumes have some common elements, but she will shift the brown light crazy to try to look like she's perfect for it. And she's a good job. This is one of the resumes that she's used. What came with this resume was a reference from somebody named Karis Stevenson. It did. What's that?

Oh, you guys. Yeah, it's too good to be true. Amanda said, email address to Ali, this is not the same as her name. I'm great. Carl said, I pray I can tell, what a better sentence structure, but I could change it in that letter.

Yeah, and and Carol is a consultant that I will say, and I'm fondly articulate. And so she gets, she has bonus points for that one for sure. Yeah, yeah, Gary Gillan's. Hi Gary he's a he's a guy from Nova Scotia. We're at, we're at LaVo move the way. He's at the same part of Grammar in both places. also said, oh, well done, Yari.

He said, Karis Stevenson doesn't seem to exist. You know, it's, she's not in Google. And, and, cumul seducers, the signature is not a wet signature what he means is not done by a pen. Yeah, no address. You guys are doing well here. And, oh, who just money? Well done, who just said, you need, you need John title

as insurance coordinator, but the reference letter talks about her like she's the office manager. Yeah. Yeah. Marlon Salomon said she can do everything. Justin Gita looks like it's copied and pasted. Yeah, let's, let's break my high-less. Another, another good Canadian guy,

I, I, Google, Karis Stevenson and she doesn't exist. Yeah, lots, lots of, lots of good answers here. Well done. So, I said, she'll go anywhere, really? Yeah, that was, that was, that was an analyst. I mean, this is somebody who's willing to relocate to anywhere in the US for an office manager position. Yeah, well done Rosary, that's definitely on our list.

And, well, there's, well, they caught just on your consultants in the pediatric world and the same thing, well, in your relocate. If you other people got that as well. Yeah, the miss, the miss spelling of recognize in the, in the, in the, in the resumes, something I didn't like. Yeah, here, here's one that's maybe a little bit more subtle. The first thing I see is that she, she,

she lists his her work experience to pretty big DSOs. And I think one of the things that she knows about and is collectively is that those, first of all, they don't love making phone calls to verify previous employment. And you just know that when you call on the SO, you're going to have to talk to probably three people and you're going to get a little bit of a run around before you actually find somebody who can confirm employment.

So if you're a little bit disinclined to make that call in the first place, then working for a DSO or another one that we're going to see later on, a big university, is a reason for people not to do it. So just to make it a little more interesting, I'm going to show you a different resume that unique used. Oh, sorry, one more thing before I leave the DSO theme. I mean, the reference from this Kara Stevenson person who I'm pretty convinced doesn't exist.

You'll see the company name at the bottom, sphere education and development. I'm wondering if, when you need to grow this letter, actually, it was trying to make people think it was sphere education and development, which is a company that most people have heard of. So I'm wondering if there's ki

This is where it all began. The inaugural episode of Prosperident's Dental Practice Owner's Podcast, recorded in April 2020, introduces David Harris, Wendy Askins, and Amber Weber — and lays the foundation for everything that follows across the entire series.

Recorded during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, when dental practices across North America were shut down or severely curtailed, this episode captures a pivotal moment: a time when financial vigilance mattered more than ever, and when the combination of disruption, uncertainty, and changed oversight routines created new vulnerabilities for practice owners to understand and address.

Topics covered include:

• How and why embezzlement takes place in dental practices — the foundational explanation
• Why dental practices are uniquely vulnerable compared to other small businesses
• The profile of the typical dental embezzler — and why it surprises most practitioners
• How embezzlement begins: the opportunity, the rationalization, and the first theft
• Why embezzlement continues for so long before detection
• The most common methods used to steal from dental practices
• The specific COVID-era conditions that created heightened embezzlement risk
• The core strategies practice owners can implement to protect themselves
• An introduction to Prosperident and how the firm helps practice owners

Whether you are a new listener discovering this podcast for the first time or a longtime follower revisiting where it started, this founding episode is essential context for everything Prosperident teaches about protecting dental practices from financial crime.

Prosperident is North America's leading dental embezzlement investigation firm. To speak with the team about your practice, visit www.prosperident.com, www.dentalembezzlement.com, or call 888-398-2327. Schedule a consultation at www.prosperident.com/meetwithdavid.

Auto-generated transcript: New Insights Into Embezzlement April 2020

You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective, as dentistrys and bezel-it experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools, and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests.

So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber, Wendy Askins, and David Harris. Talk about the issues that matter to you. We would like to welcome everybody to our Prosperident Power Hour. My name is Amber Weber, and I am a senior fraud examiner with Prosperident. I spent 13 years of the dental hygienist in office manager, and then I was fortunate to meet David and become a team member with Prosperident. My, our other host today, our Dave Harris.

He is our CEO of Prosperident, and I'd like to introduce everybody to Wendy Askins. He is a supervising examiner. Wendy has been a great mentor for me, and I've learned a lot from her. So Wendy, if you could please introduce yourself to everybody, that would be great, so we could everyone could get to know you. Oh, thanks, Amber. How many from Texas everyone? I've been with Prosperident for eight years, and I've been in the dental industry for about 30 years.

And it's been such a rewarding career. I've met amazing people, and I'm so happy to be joined up with Prosperident, and be able to fight crime every single day. Excellent. Thank you. Wendy, and we were so happy to have you. And we're so appreciative of everybody joining us today for our Prosperident Power Hour. Our CEO, Dave Harris, we'd like to hear from you about today's webinar. Good to be here. Anyway, Amber, if you're ready, I'm ready. Let's get going. Some things discussed here for security issues.

We won't be talking about certain things for that, but we're happy to have private discussions with you. So you will get our contact information at the end of the webinar, so we have specific concerns that we cannot assess here. Please feel free to contact us. So if that any other questions about that, just let us know. We'll be here to answer for you. We'll talk about a few myths. These are myths about imbezzlement that have been around for a long time and won't go away, but I want to deal with them head on.

The first one is that my accountant is protecting me from imbezzlement. Sometimes what dentists in their advisors don't realize is how narrow the accountants window really is into their practice. Picture a conversation that I could have with my accountant. I go to my accountant and I say, Mark, I'm really excited because I'm going to start this new business. And Mark, my accountant says, David, that's great. Tell me about it. And I say, well, I have this really great idea. I'm going to actually use two different pieces of software. One piece is going to track my revenue and a totally separate piece of software is going to track my expenses.

And Mark, here's the best part of all. They're not going to talk to each other. Mark would say to me, David, that's the stupidest idea I ever heard. I mean, there's no way that would work. And yet, I just described every one of your practices. Dentists use practice management software to track their revenue. They use quite books or some kind of accounting software to track their expenses. And these two, in general, do not hook up. When your accountant looks at your world, typically they're looking at the expense side,

in other words, quick books. And in the way that accounting works in the U.S. in particular, they really don't need to look at the revenue side at all. They can work from your bank account. So most accountants are not looking at your practice management software, most of the time. And that means that the chance of them finding investment, which typically takes place on the revenue side is pretty small.

I'll give you some statistics on this. When we look at embezzlement globally, accountants find about 30% of it. When we narrow our focus to dentistry, that number goes down to about 9%. So your accountant does certain procedures. If you're dealing with a dental CPA, they probably are a little bit better equipped than in generic CPA, but it's still not all that likely that what they do is going to find investment.

Here's the other myth. You know, I have really good systems in place. I have checks and balances and that's going to protect me from embezzlement. I was doing a webinar for a group the other day. And I said, the way you have to view this stuff is it's kind of like playing poker with somebody, but your cards are face up and there's art. Your staff know exactly what your systems are,

what you look at, and more importantly, what you don't. And for a thief, embezzlement is really a crime of navigation, and it involves navigating around the scrutiny that you've put in place. Let's also understand that if I'm a thief, and I want to steal from you, and the first way that I think of to do that is blocked by you, that doesn't send me home to join the church choir, it simply makes me an un-requited thief,

and I need to look for some other way to do it, and chances are pretty good I'll find it. I think I hear a lot from practitioners is, I don't take in that much cash anyway, therefore I'm not vulnerable to being stolen from. And I'll say a couple of things. First of all, I think COVID is the perfect excuse for a lot of practices to stop taking cash.

In other words, this is a great time when you reopen to say to your patient community for the safety of our staff and our patients, we're no longer accepting cash. And it gets rid of a major headache. You know, one of the real sources of annoyance and administration of the front desk. So I think that's something that a lot of practices

should be thinking about right now and possibly emblemating, and it would be fine to do as long as it's communicated in advance. In other words, you don't want to be having that conversation when something... be standing in front of one of your receptions trying to pay their bill. Having said all that, it's not that hard for thieves to steal checks with your name on them to adulterate credit card payments or even to interfere with what are sometimes

called EF to your ACH. EF to his electronic funds transfer to your bank account. You should know that thieves can steal any form of wealth transfer to you. So let's not fall into the trap of thinking, you know, there's not much cash that comes in here and therefore I'm not vulnerable. The other myth is that every piece of software will print some kind of day and report and if that report agrees with the amount of money going in my bank, I must be safe. No, it's not hard to teach software to lie.

That's another conversation we're not going to have in a public forum, but we see it on pretty much a daily basis. The final myth, and I hear there's