The Prosperident Exchange

You've noticed something. A number that doesn't add up. An employee who seems defensive when asked about finances. A patient who says they paid but your records show otherwise. What do you do next?

The steps you take — and the mistakes you avoid — in the first hours and days after suspecting embezzlement can make the difference between a successful investigation and prosecution and a situation that collapses before justice is served. In this essential episode, Prosperident's David Harris, Amber Weber, and Wendy Askins walk through exactly what to do — and critically, what not to do — when embezzlement is suspected.

Topics covered include:

• The most important rule: do not confront the suspect before calling an investigator
• Why acting on suspicion too early destroys evidence and tips off the embezzler
• How to preserve the financial records and data needed for a successful investigation
• Who to call first — and who not to call
• What to tell (and not tell) other staff members
• How to continue operating your practice while an investigation is underway
• When and how to involve law enforcement
• What the investigation process looks like from start to finish
• How to protect yourself legally and financially during and after an investigation
• Realistic expectations: what outcomes are possible and how likely each is

The wrong moves at this stage are irreversible. This episode is required listening for any dentist who has ever had a nagging feeling that something in their practice isn't right.

If you suspect embezzlement, call Prosperident before taking any other action. Visit www.prosperident.com, www.dentalembezzlement.com, or call 888-398-2327. Schedule a consultation at www.prosperident.com/meetwithdavid.

Auto-generated transcript: What To Do If You Suspect Embezzlement

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. We've got a lot that you can join us. What we're going to talk about today is picking up the pieces and what to do when the unthinkable happens. When you become a victim of imbezblemist and fraud happening in your office.

So today's topic is going to be really interesting. We're going to share information and stories for those of you who maybe haven't experienced this yet. So that if that day ever comes, you are prepared to know how to prepare yourself. Thank you, Amber. Hi, Dave. It's good to see you.

I think to see everyone else that's joined us today. I am so excited about this topic. Having worked with so many clients and walked them through that moment in time when the unthinkable has happened to them. And they find out that someone has been and does link from them. And they're just totally confused.

And they've got all of these thoughts whirling around and they're had, what do I do? Where do we go? What else is going to affect my family and my business? Today we're going to get some of those answers to you. We're going to walk you through what happens when you first become suspicious? What happens when you confirm your suspicion?

And how you confront. So from suspicion to confrontation, we're going to walk you through all of those. We're also going to walk you through the avenues of restitution that are available, but similarly and criminally. And we're also going to talk about how to manage your personal and your business reputation.

Because after you become the result, that's also very important to how you, the messaging that you control the message that goes out from that particular experience. When you have that sinking feeling, and you wake up in the middle of the night with a start and suddenly it becomes clear that maybe that trusted staff member of yours isn't so trustworthy after all.

The first thing I'm going to tell you is that when you have that feeling statistically, you're right about 70% of the time. Trust your instincts. When I get talking to doctors who call me and have that suspicion, one of the first questions I ask them is this, let's say hypothetically, this person is not still. How do you feel about them otherwise as an employee? In other words, would they keep their job or not if

the measurement was now? And sometimes, then this will say to me, you know what, they're far from my best employee anyway. So I think if they're not stealing, they probably don't have a job here. And then one of the things that I say to them very quickly is, well, okay, so if they lose their job if they're stealing and they lose their job if they're not stealing,

this might be a time to look at firing. In other words, why wait until the end of our investigation they'll live that person go? Sometimes having evidence of a measurement is helpful in getting through the termination process without, for example, getting sued. And if that's the case, then firing now may not make sense. But if you have an employee who is fireable now,

and you're not happy with them, and you also think they're stealing, well, let's just do what's gonna happen anyway and get them up in order. The next thing I'm gonna say is this, if you have suspicions about somebody, it's really vital that you not let that person know that you have concerns. And it was a case where there was a murder.

And this happened in Annronville County, so just outside Baltimore, Maryland, and somebody named Shantay, Dr. Hickman, ended up murdering her doctor because Shantay thought that the doctor was gonna catch her stealing. And I mean, this is a, this is a terribly tragic story. And what makes it even worse than it would be otherwise is that they amount that she had stolen was $17,000.

If somebody's going to go to jail, you know, the list of things they would not do to prevent that from happening's pretty short. Now, thieves don't always think things through. If somebody's embezzling from you and your practice burns down, they're gonna be the number one suspect. I mean, they will get caught in punishment, but that isn't necessarily consistent with how they think.

Here are some of the things that doctors do when they suspect an investment to get them caught or get them uncovered. The first one is you go to your receptionist or your office manager and you ask for a whole bunch of reports you've never asked for before. And then the next thing you do with those reports is you take them into your private office,

you close the door, you phone your CPA and you spend an hour on the phone your CPA. If I am a thief and I'm stealing from you, every morning when you come into the practice, I look at you and I ask myself the question, does she know that I'm stealing? And anything like kind of actions I'm talking about here will cement in my mind that you are.

Of course, one of the cardinal sins here is to bring onsite investigators. One thing, if you've been watching our webinars that you know about us is that we do everything we can to avoid setting foot in your practice. And almost everything that we do is done at a distance. And the internet is very much our friend in that. But onsite investigators,

you know, it's very hard to stick a geeky account and looking person in your practice for four days and claim that they're there to fix your compressor.

So we don't want to do that. And we're going to talk a little bit later about confronting the suspect. Certainly when you have suspicions or even discovery of investment is way too early to confront a suspect at that point. You need to know a lot more than you do at that juncture. And all you're likely to do if you're in the 70% who are right

is tip your hand prematurely. And if you're in the 30% where they get suspicious and it's not true, then you're going to ruin a relationship within a place. So there is a time for confrontation. but it's not early on. And we all know that Dennis love to fix things quickly. This is a case where you really need to be a little bit patient.

So if you do kids somewhere, someone red handed, just like you were talking Dave, you can't let your emotions get in the middle of it. So this slide's kind of talks about a childhood story that we're also familiar with Pinocchio. Pinocchio has celebrated 80th anniversary this year. And going back to the thought of Pinocchio, this is where, as a practice owner, you can really get your lesson on honesty. So in the story of Pinocchio, every time the situation rose, the story always changed. But when you catch someone red handed, this is when you have to have your ducks in the row and have everything ready

As 2021 began, dentistry was emerging from one of the most disruptive periods in its history. The pandemic had shuttered practices, altered patient behavior, strained teams, and created extraordinary financial uncertainty — but it had also opened up new opportunities for practice owners willing to adapt and lead. In this forward-looking episode, Prosperident's Wendy Askins, Amber Weber, and David Harris are joined by Kirk Behrendt, CEO of ACT Dental, to discuss where dentistry stands and how practice owners can seize the moment.

Kirk Behrendt is one of dentistry's most energetic and insightful practice coaches, known for his ability to help dental teams reconnect with their purpose and build practices they love. His message coming into 2021 was one of optimism, strategy, and focused action.

Topics covered include:

• The state of dental practice as the profession emerged from pandemic disruption
• The specific opportunities that the post-pandemic environment created for dentists
• How to reset and rebuild team culture after a period of intense stress
• The practice metrics that matter most as production ramps back up
• Leadership lessons from the pandemic: what it revealed about dental practice owners
• How to think about growth, investment, and capacity in an uncertain environment
• The financial oversight habits that protect practices during periods of rapid change
• Kirk's framework for building a practice with intention and joy

About Kirk Behrendt: Kirk is the CEO of ACT Dental, a leading dental practice coaching organization dedicated to helping dentists build better practices and better lives. Visit www.actdental.com to learn more about his work.

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

Auto-generated transcript: Hello, 2021: Full Steam Ahead

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.

Friends, I am so honored to be the first Prosperident representative to tell you happy new year. I hope you're all doing well, and thank you so much for joining us this evening. My name is Wendy Askins, and I'm the supervising examiner for Prosperident. My co-hostess is Amber Weber, and she's also a fellow Texan of mine. Amber is the Senior Fraud Examiner, and then we are joined by our fearless leader and CEO of Prosperident, David Harris from Halthax, Canada.

We're thrilled that you have joined us this evening to go full steam ahead in 2021, and we've even got a special guest joining us this evening. So Amber, why don't you get us started? So, both of them have had 2021. We want to give you some great information about moving forward this year. As a company, Prosperident is best known for investigating and development, and we love the opportunity to help owners establish protective systems for their practice. So we want to help you even if, and development isn't occurring,

we have decades of experience, and all of our great experts, we come from many different fields of dentistry. So we have a lot of background and expertise that we can, we come together and help you as the practice owners, people who work in practices, people who have interaction with dental practices, we want those practices to be as safe and protected as possible, because we truly do love the field of dentistry. Our background and experience with many different types of specialists and different people in the dental industry has given us so many opportunities and windows into hundreds of successful

practices annually. So we want to be able to deliver as much information to those of you that we haven't got to work with yet. And now let's introduce our special guest for tonight. His name is Kirk Barron. Kirk is a lot of things. He's the CEO of a company called Act Digital that provides terrific consulting to people. He also hosts something.

I've been privileged to be on a few times called the best practice as show. And I did an episode with Kirk the other day and it was fun. We just laughed and carried on and it was a ball. So we are so honored to have him with us today. He's got amazing ideas about how to make your practice the best it can be. And I really look forward to what he has to say. So let's talk about the state of the world that we're in right now. You know, this past year was so bad.

I just feel like I'm blessed even if I'm alive. And I still have a roof over my hand and I have a job that I love. Sometimes you just have to get down to basics with gratitude and like gratitude, your heart. But anyway, let's talk about what the ADA says the state or the financial state of dentistry is as of about the middle of December. Now the health policy institute of the ADA conducted polling for several months last year after the COVID crisis began. And they actually had two parts of polling.

One was the recovery and renewal polling for the business of dentistry. If that's what you want to call it. And then they also had a consumer poll asking just regular everyday consumers of dentistry. How they felt about the safety of being in the dental office. And what they found out and what they published as of the middle of December is that the good news is that the 99% of dental offices are now open. A little bit less than 40, I'm sorry, a little bit less than half of the business is recorded business as usual. Ironically, as far as patient volume is concerned and adonics and oral surgeons reported the highest patient volume.

And we're going to do something a little bit different in this webinar. And since we have our gas curve, what we're going to do is we're going to have a little discussion at the end of each slide. So that we can have some other ideas about the points that we're trying to make. And one thing I'd like to hear is what you guys on the panel think about why endodonics and oral surgery happened to be like, I'm not a patient volume, that seems a little odd to me, but we'll get around to discussing that in just a moment. Anyway, there were major enterprises that responded to the polling. And commented that they were about 22% down from pre-COVID patient volumes, which honestly, if you think about what we had to go through last year as an industry, just being down 22% is not that bad. I've heard, you know, some estimates of 40 to 50% down, but thank God, it's just 22% of pre-COVID volume.

Now on the consumer side, what we're seeing is 86% of pollsters said that they had either number one, then an adonol office, since COVID started happening, or number two, they would have no hesitation into going into an adonol office. So that's 86%. So we're doing pretty good there, but there are still those patients who are concerned with their health about 14%. And they're going to hold off until a vaccine is readily available to them. And then as employers and employees, what we see is that employment is at almost 100% of what it was pre-COVID, which is awesome as well. So for our panelists, some of the questions that I have, and you guys can just answer randomly about what you think about this, in the report, it also stated that only 1% of the practices are offering point of care, rapid COVID testing. Do any of you happen to think that that's going to be an issue for... for dentistry, are we gonna have to start offering that? Wendy, I think it's the vaccine rolls out

that's gonna get less important. Do you mean what comes across from some of this, is that most people rightly believe that dentistry is safe that they can get dental treatment. And I remember when COVID first flared up, you asked about the oral surgeons and the endodontists. And I guess my theory is there sort of the least elective end of dentistry.

Usually when somebody needs the endodontists, they either need the endodontistory or paintails. So I think that's why, but I think dentistry's done a great job of reassuring the public that you're safe in our care. Yeah, another question. And I hope the endodontists and oral surgeons in our audience don't take offense to them.

But I totally get what you're saying. Another correlation that I've made, which is interesting is a possible opportunity with the fact that we're almost at 100% employment, pre-COVID employment, but yet we're still at 78% of patient volume. What type of opportunities do you think that's ringing? Yeah, can I chime in here just a little bit?

This episode is a special cross-post from the Nifty Thrifty Dentists platform. Dr. Glenn Vo — the dentist-entrepreneur behind the massively popular Nifty Thrifty Dentists Facebook group and community — interviews Prosperident CEO David Harris on the topic that dental practice owners need to understand: embezzlement.

Dr. Vo's community of cost-conscious dental professionals gets to the point. In this conversation, David Harris delivers exactly what dentists most want to know about embezzlement — the facts, the risks, the warning signs, and the practical steps — in a direct and accessible format suited to busy practitioners.

Topics covered include:

• How prevalent embezzlement really is in dental practices — the statistics dentists need to know
• Who embezzles, and why the typical embezzler is not who you'd expect
• The most common methods used to steal from dental practices
• Why embezzlement is so often invisible to the practice owner for years
• The warning signs that should prompt action
• The single most important thing dentists should do to protect themselves
• What to do when you suspect something is wrong
• How Prosperident's investigation process works
• The financial and emotional aftermath of confirmed embezzlement

About Dr. Glenn Vo and Nifty Thrifty Dentists: Dr. Vo is a practicing dentist and the founder of Nifty Thrifty Dentists, a thriving online community dedicated to helping dental professionals save money and run smarter, more efficient practices. Visit niftythriftydentists.com to learn more.

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: What you REALLY want to know about embezzlement in dental practices -- David Harris interviewed by Dr. Glenn Vo

Support DDS brings you the virtual team solution to support your office and increase your efficiency. Tests such as ensures verification, phone support, administrative tasks, anything that is repetitive that bogs down your team. Support DDS can do that. Your phone office can focus on a patient experience and bring the personal touch you want to project. The Nifty Deal is $200 off your monthly service. To get this deal, you have to go to supportdds.com and mention Nifty thrifty. Hey, what's up everyone? It's Dr. Glenn Vowe and this is a special edition of the Nifty thrifty Dennis podcast.

It's called the Nifty Deals. This is where we spotlight a particular deal that we negotiated for you, the dental professional. So sit back, relax, listen to all the awesome info and get ready to get hooked up with the Nifty deal. Hey, what's up everyone? It's Dr. Glenn Vowe and thank you so much for tuning in because today this morning I have a very special guest. David Harris. He is the dentist's investment expert himself. David, thank you so much for jumping on today. Hey, it's great to be here.

You know, your company is called Prospera Dint. And you're like that resident expert when it comes to investment. Just one of those words that we don't want to say and we don't want to think about. It's almost like it's probably as bad as PPO, probably worse than PPO sometimes. But David, let's start with this for those who, and I've been following you and I've been using your resources and I'm always learning something. But for those who do not know what you do, right? And I've already kind of spilled the beans in the beginning. But for those who don't know who you are and what you do, they've just really briefly talk about what you and your company do for the dental industry. Absolutely. We do two things.

We investigate when a dentist thinks that somebody is stealing from him or her. So typically it's a staff member, but it could be, it could be somebody like a bookkeeper, you know, an external bookkeeper accountant or what happens probably more than people want to think about is you have several doctors in the group practice. And one of them is is getting paid more than they should. And coincidentally, it's typically the one who handles the finances. Yeah, I mean, it's just some of the, some of the case studies that you have that you have posted have been like jaw dropping and eye opening. But for those who are watching right now, if you have any questions, there's two ways you can do this. You can post it in the comments and I'll read it to David or you can message to me. If you, if you actually have, if you're in like a situation and you're like, okay, I don't want people know what's going on. I can message to me, I'm have my other screen up and I'll feel those questions to David, but man, we're going to dive right into this David, let's let's shock some people because you've shocked me when I've watched some of your webinars. Let's just shock some people let's let's throw out talk about some of the, some of the case studies that you've presented in the, in the past and let's just go over let's start with the ones that that to this day still have you drop in your draw.

What a job, what do you talk about it. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about some some cases there. So, you know, cases can be noteworthy here for a lot of reasons. Of course, the big one is dollars. Yeah, the biggest and bezel man I've ever seen in a dental practice was about two million dollars. Two million dollars. We have a, we have part of our website called the Hall of Shame and I, I think you, you spend a little bit of time there. This is part where we profiling bezelers and we have about six hundred and eighty of them profile. And we have this part of our Hall of Shame. We call the million dollar club. So that's people who have more than a million dollars from their practice and they're about seven of them.

And then we have the half million dollar club, which is quite as exclusive but has as pretty plus of its members. You know, the average amount that if these steals to the point where they get caught from a dentist is about a hundred thousand dollars. That's what average. Wow. And let's talk about that. Let's talk about the Hall of Shame, right? That two million dollar. I mean, I'm just, I'm just wrapping, I'm just wrapping that around, I'm wrapping my mind around it. But let's talk about that particular case. Was it was it was the office manager? Was it the financial coordinator? Whatever you can can share, talk about that and how did they end up in bezeling two million dollars? Well, first of all, it doesn't happen in a weekend. You know, that, that happens over a protracted period of time.

The typical large dollar thief is somebody who's already been with the practice for a long time before they start stealing. And normally the office manager, you know, this person enjoys the doctor's trust. The doctor involved tends to be somebody who's very clinically focused and very hands-off in terms of the money part of the practice. And you know, that's a recurring factor in most big thefts. A lot of the people who get hit by big dollars are really high achieving dentists. You know, they're, they're multi-skilled people who, you know, do a lot of full-moth reconstruction and implants and stuff like that. And if, you know, if you're practicing at that level, it's pretty all consuming. And you need to spend a lot of energy on, you know, building and then maintaining your knowledge base and kind of complex interactions with patients because obviously the way you

the way you talk to a patient who's contemplating spending $80,000 on a full-moth job is a little bit different than the conversation you have in the opportunity with somebody who might need a crown. Right. They tend to be clinical high achievers and what they give up typically to get there is some some level oversight on the practice finances. Yeah, because they're probably delegating, they're focusing on what they're really good at and they're delegating in their. trusting some team members and they're like, okay, I'm gonna let them handle it. And I'm just gonna, I'm just focused on producing a lot. And also, I guess with those type of practices,

they're producing so much, they're bringing so much money in. And when you bring in that much money in, it's kind of easy to kind of tuck up these things here and there, right David? It's a lot harder to steal from a struggling dentist than it is from one who's financially comfortable. And if your audience thinks back to

when they started practice right out of school, they had big student dad and, they were probably at that point watching their pennies pretty carefully. Fiber 10 years later, people have gotten some distance from the wolves that were chasing them before and they'll go more relaxed financially. And that's kind of the point where you can be a little more vulnerable.

Yeah, absolutely. Guys, for those who are tuning in just now, see a bunch of people jumping on, if you have an

Who better to ask about dental practice finances than someone who lives inside the numbers every day? Mara Johnson, a bookkeeper specializing exclusively in dental practices, sits down with Prosperident CEO David Harris for a conversation that bridges two perspectives that rarely share the same stage: the financial records specialist and the embezzlement investigator.

Mara brings the view from the bookkeeping desk — the patterns she sees in dental practice financials, the questions she asks, and the anomalies that catch her attention. David brings three decades of investigative experience. Together they walk through the warning signs, the financial habits, and the oversight practices that protect dental practice owners from theft.

Topics covered include:

• What a dental bookkeeper sees that a practice owner typically doesn't
• The financial warning signs most visible in a practice's books
• How embezzlement typically shows up — or hides — in dental financial records
• The role of an outside bookkeeper in detecting and deterring theft
• What a practice owner should expect from their bookkeeper in terms of oversight
• The questions every dentist should be asking about their own financials
• Practical steps practice owners can take right now to improve financial visibility
• How Prosperident's work intersects with and complements bookkeeping services

About Mara Johnson: Mara Johnson is a bookkeeper specializing in dental practices, based in Texas. Her firm, MJ Bookkeeping, provides financial management and bookkeeping services tailored specifically to the needs of dental practice owners. Visit www.mjbookkeepingtx.com to learn more.

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: Dental Bookkeeper Mara Johnson interviews Prosperident's David Harris

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.

Hi, I'm Mariah Johnson with MJ Dental Bookkeeping. And I am very honored to have David Harris with us today. He is the CEO of Prosperident and is the dental investment expert. And it's been doing this for, I believe, three decades. He is very much a sought after speaker and is the author of dental investment, the art of theft and the science of control. And he has taught me everything I know about dental investment. So it is a huge honor to have you here.

It's great to see you, David. Great to see you, Mariah. I'm really flattered that you asked me to do this. Likewise, well, thank you. So a lot of people ask me, is this really a problem in general practices? So what would you say to that? It definitely is pinning down the exact numbers is a little bit of a challenge sometimes. And I'll maybe touch on why in a minute.

But it's safe to say that if somebody is graduating from dental school today, there's probably an 80% chance that they'll be embezzled at some point in their career. There's about a 40% chance that they'll be embezzled more than what's. Wow. Wow. The confounding factor in measuring the numbers is that some embezzlement never gets detected probably. And some gets detected but never reported anybody. And those two things sort of make the final number of it elusive.

But the 80% is pretty safe. Yeah, so many people never even know. I just, I think I told you recently about a friend of mine who's dad had a dental practice and was embezzled for 15 years. Sold the practice and didn't find out about the embezzlement. That was almost a million dollars until two years after the practice. So sometimes, Dennis have no clue it's even happening. It's very true. And what I think some of the audience may not realize about embezzlement is how interactive a crime it is.

In other words, how much it is dependent on the person who's doing the embezzling, starting by studying their adversary, the dentist, and saying, alright, what does this person look at? And more importantly, what don't they look at in their practice? And then the embezzler builds a scheme that is designed to bypass whatever the doctor looks at. That's custom made schemes. Well said, yeah, it really is. Well, what are some of the misconceptions? Because I feel like there are so many about how to how to find this and just on the subject in general.

Well, let's start with vulnerability. A lot of dentists convince themselves that they're not likely to be embezzlement victims. And let's face it. Life is more comfortable if you can if you can talk yourself into that. And I hear a lot of reasons why people think they they won't be victims. For example, my staff have been with me forever. Or I live in a small town and really embezzlement is an urban problem. You know, it happens in big cities when you end up hiring people, you don't know very well.

I put that one. Yeah, but all my you know, all my staff started out as my patients. So I know them really well. The thing I'll say about embezzlement, Mara, is that it's a selfish crime. So the person who's doing it doesn't think about their victim or the situation or anything else. It's about me, me, me. I mean or I want. And so there's no there's no immune practice.

There's no practice where the circumstances mean that somebody will never be embezzled. Another one that I hear a lot. And this is a this is a good way to illustrate the point of making is I pity my staff really well. And the typical embezzlement will take between two and four percent of a practice is gross revenue. So on a practice that that brings in a million dollars a year, that translates to somewhere close to forty thousand dollars that an embezzler can be stealing. When a hairdo doctor say that she pays her staff really well, she's talking about sort of one or two dollars an hour above the local going right. It comes nowhere close to scratching that it's right. And then you have the embezzlers who aren't stealing because they need the money.

They're stealing to address an ego deficit. You know, they feel underappreciated by society or more specifically by the practice order. And they're stealing to take what they think they should have received in the first place. And for those people, it doesn't matter what you pay them. But it's almost irrelevant. The real question is what they believe they should be paid, which is invariably a bigger number. You talk in your book a lot about justification. Yeah.

And how, you know, someone that works in a don't practice, they're seeing all that money coming in. They don't know what the loan payment is. The student loan payment for that dentist. They don't know all the expenses they have. They just see that money coming in and so sometimes they feel like, hey, I'm doing all this work for the dentist. I need to get a cut, you know, I need to get a piece of that. So they don't, they don't always appreciate what the dentist has gone through to get where he is. Or she is.

Every staff member over estimates how much the dentist takes home. You know, partly because as you say, some of the overhead is invisible. Right. To the staff, even the stuff that they see, they tend to kind of forget about on a day to day basis because you're right. They see lots and lots and lots of money in there in their in their scale coming in. And they just assume that their dentist is is walking home with the gross revenue, which we and every dentist in the audience knows is just not remotely possible. Yeah. When you think about a dentistry is a fairly high overhead business.

You know, and and for most of your your audience probably overhead in the 60 to 70% range is not uncommon. So the difference between gross and that is significant. But yeah, every embellish or who. I've ever talked to about this, had just a very worked perception of how much the doctor actually took home. And then the student loans alone. I don't know what the average student loan amount is,

but it's quite large six figures, usually. I don't think for somebody graduating today, 400,000 would be out of the question. So you're right. There's a significant investment in education and it has to be recouped. And the other thing that I'll say about every dentist is that they made a choice.

You know, they could have left school after their undergrad degree and become a drug rapper, work for Henry Shiner, something like that. And they chose to forgo that and spend another four years if they're

What does it take to steal a million dollars from a dental practice? More than you might think — and less than most dentists would believe. In this gripping episode, Prosperident hosts Amber Weber and David Harris are joined by five of Prosperident's senior investigators — Sonya Hudson, Tony Ulbrandt, Kelly Paxton, Pat Little, and Scott Clifford — each of whom shares one of the most extraordinary embezzlement cases they have personally worked on.

These are the cases that define careers: the ones that involve staggering dollar amounts, elaborate concealment schemes, and offenders whose stories defy easy explanation. From a dentist's spouse who turned theft into a lifestyle to compulsive gamblers and compulsive spenders who drained practices to fund their habits, each case illuminates a different dimension of dental embezzlement at its most extreme.

Cases and topics covered include:

• Sonya Hudson's case: the anatomy of a seven-figure embezzlement and how it stayed hidden
• Tony Ulbrandt's case: how a compulsive gambler systematically looted a practice to fund losses
• Kelly Paxton's case: a compulsive spender whose lifestyle was entirely funded by theft
• Pat Little's case: a dentist's spouse who exploited insider access to steal over an extended period
• Scott Clifford's case: an embezzler whose sophistication and longevity made for one of the most complex investigations on record
• The common threads that run through all large-scale dental embezzlement cases
• What enabled these thefts to reach the scale they did — and what could have stopped them earlier

This episode is both a cautionary collection and a masterclass in understanding how embezzlement actually unfolds at its most serious. Every practice owner who hears it will look at their own financial oversight with fresh eyes.

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: The Million Dollar Club -- Learn from Dentistry's Elite Embezzlers

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.

Monthly power hour. Today we have a special group of individuals, all of our vaminers across Canada and the United States, have teamed up so that we can introduce all of you to the million dollar clubs. We want you to meet and bevelments at a week group. Thanks, Amber. In case you're wondering the third leg of our triangle, Wendy Askins is actually on assignment today.

So she won't be with us. It is just Amber and me as hosts. We're thrilled today to have some guest presenters, and we have five of them. And each of them is a Prosperident Investigator. They all bring different skills and attributes to the table. And we gave them each a very simple challenge. We said we want you to bring one of your most interesting cases

today and talk about it. So we'll tell you a little bit about these people, and then we're just going to turn the floor over to them to talk about their stories. And the first person is Sonja Hudson. Sonja lives in Ontario, Canada. She does a lot of our Canadian case files. And Sonja has been with us, gosh, I think at least at least a year. And I'm probably missing a couple that she'll set me straight.

Sonja is unquestionably one of the most organized people I have ever met. Her mind is just like this gigantic file cabinet. It's just amazing to watch. Our next examiner that is going to share his story tonight is Tony O'Brien. He is one of our U.S. examiners. He resides in Georgia. He is one of three supervising examiners with Prosperident. And I'll leave member of Prosperident's litigation support services team.

The interesting thing to know about Tony, he was one of the first people that helped me when I come on with Prosperident. And he is known to Prosperident as the data analysis with her. He is an Excel spreadsheet guru. So if you ever have an Excel question, he is the person to talk to about it. No doubt about that whatsoever. Next is Kelly Passen.

And Kelly is a little bit different in our team in this sense that almost everybody comes from a dental background. Kelly does not. Kelly's had a tremendously varied and interesting career. She's been a special agent for the United States government. She's worked in a sheriff's department. She was a fraud investigator for Nike, you know, the guys who make the shoes that my son buys.

She's really been in a lot of different facets of fraud investigation. She's also known nationally and internationally for her work in what's called pink color crime. And Kelly is a really celebrated in terms of her research and speaking about female and bezlers. And when we talk about dentistry, of course, we all know that the majority of the bezlers are female. Next is Pat Little.

He resides in Florida. The interesting thing about Pat is he is very well accomplished. He started his career as a practicing dentist. And he had two successful dental practices. From that, Pat continues to complete his education in accounting. And from there, he was able to be diversified in his clinical and dental experience and merge that with his financial knowledge in the dental world. So Pat is very, very qualified.

It's interesting all the facts and the things he knows from the clinical side to the business side. And he's just an all-around nice guy to boot last. And what by no means least Scott Clifford. Scott is another one of our supervising examers. So we have three levels of examiners called Fraud Examiner, Senior Fraud Examiner, and supervising examiner. Supervising examiners are the people that we give cases to that no sane person would accept. And I think Scott will will freely admit that.

Now, I'm just going to mention a little technical challenge with Scott tonight. Scott lives in Northern California. And if you watch the news and all you've heard that wildfires once again are a factor. And Scott was on warning for a couple of days that they were likely to have their electricity turned off. In fact, that has happened. Now, Scott's able to be worth us by phone. Scott is just an amazing investigator. And he really tackles some challenging files and comes out shining every time.

So first up tonight is Sonja Hudson. Sonja, when you're ready, let's turn on your video and tell everybody your story. Well, thank you, David, for those wonderful introductions, including mine. And let's get started. So basically, let me introduce you to Jennifer Leslie. Jennifer Leslie was a demo office manager in a multi office dental practice, who imbezzled over a half a million dollars in approximately three years. I was engaged to investigate and work with the regional police to put together a case.

And predominantly, it was to capture the methodology used as well as the total amount and bezzled. So let's talk about how Leslie did this. Well, she didn't have the normal access of what we see in most of our cases to the accounts receivable or the patient transactions and the dental practice management software. So what she did use was what she had access to. And you'll find that with in bezzlers that they will often find whatever means they can to perform the activity that they need.

So in her case, what she had access to was the accounts payable records. So this was a new case for me. One of the first ones I've done in the accounts payable side. So what she had actually done is she had set up suppliers and vendors in their account in software with names that the dentists would recognize. So they were legitimate names of suppliers and vendors. But many cases, the money is actually were directed into her personal bank account.

Another thing she did was she was in control of payroll and the bonus payment plans and often she overpaid herself on many occasions in this respect. So I had documented just over a half a million dollars in the three-year period. Okay, some of the warning signs and the symptoms that were identified. So the dentist was working as hard as ever

and his practices were running smoothly and he just didn't see the bank balance supporting the work that was being done. And often that's the first clue for Adenis is that there's not enough money in the bank and we're working hard that chairs are full and we don't have any explanation for that. Another symptom that we the dentist identified

was in the behaviors displayed by the suspect. So in her particular case, she had addictive and compulsive behaviors, gambling being one of them. She was also living beyond her means, vacationing, purchases, vehicles, all of that nature. So living beyond her means is definitely a flag for us. And one in particular with respect to her duties is that when she was away f

Every dental practice owner has experienced it: the exhausting search for a great hire, the promising candidate who turns out to be a disappointment, and the nagging fear of bringing the wrong person into your practice. In this practical episode, Prosperident's David Harris, Wendy Askins, and Amber Weber are joined by dental practice coach Penny Reed to share a systematic, proven approach to finding and selecting the right person — every time.

The stakes in dental hiring are higher than most industries. A bad hire doesn't just underperform — they can disrupt your team culture, damage patient relationships, and in the worst cases, steal from you. This episode addresses both dimensions: finding exceptional employees and structuring your hiring process to screen out those who represent a financial risk.

Topics covered include:

• Why most dental practices make the same hiring mistakes repeatedly
• How to write a job posting that attracts the right candidates and deters the wrong ones
• The interview techniques that reveal character, not just competence
• How to conduct reference checks that actually produce useful information
• Background screening: what to check, how to check it, and what to do with what you find
• The behavioral and personality signals associated with embezzlement risk
• How to structure the onboarding process to set new hires up for success
• The probationary period: how to use it effectively and what to watch for
• Building a team culture that makes dishonesty uncomfortable and hard to sustain

About Penny Reed: Penny Reed is a dental practice coach and consultant specializing in team development, leadership, and practice growth. Her practical, results-focused approach has helped hundreds of dental practices build stronger, more effective teams.

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: Easy Steps to Your Best New Hire Ever

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.

Welcome. We are so excited to have our audience with us on our monthly Prosperident Power Hour. Today we're going to talk about a very interesting, but yet challenging topic in dentistry, hiring your best employee ever, the easy steps for your new, for your best new hire ever. I have my amazing co-hosts with us tonight. Wendy Askins, she joined us from Texas. She's our supervising examiner. Our CEO, Dave Harris, way up there from Nova Scotia.

And then we have a special guest, Penny Reed, that we are excited to have you share her wealth of information for our audience. So we look forward to everybody being part of tonight's webinar. I have the job of introducing our special guest tonight. And as you know, we try to bring you some of the thought leaders in dentistry. And this lady is clearly one of them. She's Penny Reed. She has a long time consultant. She and I got started in dentistry around the same time.

I may have beaten her by a couple of years. But the difference was I was an adult at the time and she was 12. Penny has been a consultant and speaker and author for a very long time. Her book is called Growing Your Dental Business. And it's available. I think on Amazon Penny. Yes, it's on Amazon. Aside from all that, Penny has fairly recently started a new job. And why don't you tell us what you're doing, Penny?

Yes. So I still have a few clients with dental coaching institute. I recently joined ESS dental Solutions as their chief strategy officer. And we are also launching an educational platform called dental Zing, which is in its infancy. The brand was just born. So we're super excited about that. Wow, terrific. And we may hear a little bit more about ESS as we go through. But as I say, we're just honored.

Like you wouldn't believe to have Penny with us tonight. What I'll tell you about Penny and I've known her for a long time. There is no BS whatsoever that comes out of her mouth. She has this very direct and almost blunt way of putting things sometimes. And I just adore. So hopefully we'll get to see a little bit of that tonight as well. We're going to talk about a topic that is so incredibly important. So necessary for all of us and yet the majority of us at least in dentistry,

us left writers absolutely hate to do it. So here's what happens, right? You come in on a Friday, back door your office, your feeling good. Because you're going to have a great weekend and all of a sudden, your office manager approaches you and says, I need to talk to you. Now, you don't know exactly what she means, but you know it can't be good just by the turn of her voice.

And sure enough, she gives you her two weeks notice. Immediately panextract your heart as a lightning bolt strikes you in the head. And you would rather go out on the freeway and drag someone out. And on out of their car, into your office and put them in the office manager's seat, then to have to go through hours of resumes and hours of unending interviews. Right? We all get it. But today, what we hope that we can do is to give you some encouragement and give you just a few simple tips and

tricks that will make the process more effective and more efficient. So you can get that long term daytime family member and get them to stay with you. So I love this illustration because this is how we wish attracting the right team. Remember worked. Right? We wish that they would just show up on our door that it would be so simple. But we could simply say, hey, we're hiring and then boom, there they are just like the Easter Bunny used to deliver my Easter basket with mostly things in it that I liked.

Yeah, that's not usually how it, you know, we're younger in a day and time. Although last night, my husband and I watched a movie about Bonnie. So you couldn't really trust, but gotten a little more savvy and sneaky. So they're not just drawn, the right people are not just drawn to the office. As I say, it's a little bit of your gut instinct and a little bit of science or actually a whole lot of science into attracting those right team members. Let's talk about the wrong employee and I took a little bit of conversation here from this Facebook group, which is called trapped in the op. And so this is a group largely of people who are working in clinical positions in practices right now and we'd rather be doing something else. And the person who made this post and I quickly labeled her as cranky pants comma RDH.

Here's what she said. She said, and I can just imagine the whining tone that's going on when this is said and I probably can't quite mimic that. But my office wants hygienist checking out our own patients and collecting money from them when we are short handed at the front desk. And she went on to say, I don't exactly feel comfortable taking money from the patient. It feels weird and unprofessional. The doctor wants us cross-trained, but it's not like assistance and receptionist can do hygiene. And I am thinking to myself, you know, if I had this person working for me, I would shoot myself. Yeah, I think if I can comment on this. Yeah, please. I think what we're putting some of, you know, some of the best clients I've worked with and think about my first business partner who was in still is a practicing dentist.

And I remember when he told me. one of the leadership lessons that he had learned. And that is that he had to be willing to do anything as a leader that he asked the team to do, right? Scrub the toilet vacuum the floor, change a light bulb, not that he did those things all the time. But he had to be willing to do that. And then I think the other is I recently moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, and I've gotten a new everything, right? A new carer tractor, you know, new new bank, we're figuring all that out. And I had a late appointment a couple of weeks ago and guests who took my payment, the carer tractor, right? So, so if the doctor is willing to do whatever it takes, and that's what we're really looking for, right?

As someone who's open, it's not the fact that they don't want to take the payment, that's the issue, it's that whole mindset of why should I have to do that. And that is something that I don't want to say it's impossible to change with the candidate. But woo, yeah, I agree with you. Having something like that, would spread like wildfire on y

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