Menace of the cuckoo workers
People do all sorts of things that they really should not while they are at their desks from online shopping to arranging babysitters and most companies understand and accept this. But some employees go a little further. While “working” for their company, they are also working for and in some cases running other businesses. At the very least they are stealing their employer's time. At worst, they are defrauding the people who pay their salaries.
These are the “cuckoo business” tycoons.
“We've come across a number of situations where someone's diverting customers or intellectual property,” says John Smart, a partner in global investigation at Ernst & Young. “It's not that unusual and it's often a precursor to them heading out the door with half the business.” Numbers, he continues, are difficult to come by businesses tend not to advertise the fact that they have been duped. Anecdotally, however, such cases seem to be increasing.
Mr Smart was recently hired by a a Spanish company to investigate a small UK subsidiary. The company had been tipped off that its British managing director was running a competitor business on the side. It was finally established that this cuckoo company to which business was being diverted was in fact being “run” by the man's wife. “The man was dismissed”, says Mr Smart, “although it was impossible to prove anything. Eventually we just had to say that it was considered inappropriate.”
Michael Patrick, managing director of Madysen, a scanning technology business based in Bristol in the UK, found himself on the receiving end of such a scam. “I had four employees who started a company three months before they left and started diverting business. They founded the business in August and I discovered it in October after an anonymous tip-off. They had set up a mirror image of my company.” By the time he knew what was going on, the cuckoo business was well established and the employees were busily diverting goods and business. Mr Patrick says that he approached the government's Department for Trade and Industry, “but they were powerless to act”. He also spoke to the police, but failed to stir them into action. Eventually, he hired Diligentia, a private investigations service which put the suspects under surveillance - much of it real cloak and dagger stuff. This resulted in three arrests and the recovery of more than ￡100,000 ($179,000) worth of equipment. As it happens, the court action was dropped because one of the accused committed suicide two days before charges were due to be brought. “It's been hell,” says Mr Patrick. “You have to go after them and it takes a year. But if I hadn't [brought in the investigators], I would have lost my company.”
Henry Hobson, managing director of Diligentia, says that investigations of this sort are what he spends most of his time doing. “It happens all the time,” he explains. “We've also had stockbrokers siphoning off clients and then setting up on their own. It can be anything from employees getting together and using their company's time and resources to run another business all the way through to fraud and theft on a massive scale.”
Indeed, as Mr Hobson says, not all of these corporate cuckoos are big birds. Rather than steal an employer's time and money, some employees are simply running their own companies from their desks.
Simon Dawson, head of corporate investigations at the Risk Advisory Group, an investigation and intelligence consultancy, recalls working with a charity. “We found three guys in the information technology department. One was running a property letting business, another was downloading counterfeit software and using the company's facilities to package it, and a third spent most of his time running a website devoted to sci-fi in the 1950s.” One of the problems for employers is the blurring of what constitutes reasonable behaviour and what does not. Few bosses are going to complain if an employee sells a couple of pieces of antique jewellery on eBay, the online auctioneer. But internet auctions can be addictive and some people have turned hobbies into full-blown commercial enterprises which start to eat into work time. The huge leap in the affordability and efficacy of high performance technology has been a boon to those who want to have their job and cheat it. It sounds like an advertising slogan, but these days you really can run a business with a laptop and mobile phone. And the incentives to do this are far greater if someone else is picking up the bill for the support infrastructure.
Not that it should be imagined that all these scams are high tech. Toby Latta, director of corporate investigations at Control Risks Group, a London-based business risk consultancy, worked with a business where the typing pool's productivity had dropped mysteriously. The reason? Staff were using the company facilities to sell cosmetics, drumming up business on the telephone. In a rather more flagrant case, Control Risks Group helped a US company to discover that their Moscow representative was running a brothel from the premises.
Clearly, this kind of abuse can occur at any level of a company's hierarchy. But, says Mr Latta, the offenders are often relatively senior and long-serving, “in positions of considerable trust”. In fact, they are often the last people you would expect: when most people think of this type of internal fraud, they think in terms of a worker in the mailroom running a small-scale scam, or a salesman passing off clients.
Much more often though, it is the long-serving middle manager, someone who knows the ropes and may not be subject to level of scrutiny that a more recent recruit might be. Why do they do it? Any number of reasons. Perhaps they were passed over for a promotion; there may be money troubles at home; or they may simply be bored. Whatever the case, people higher up the company are likely to cause far more damage than those lower down.
Executives overseeing the award of contracts are probably guilty of the most flagrant abuse. “The classic is a catering contract being awarded to a business ‘run' by the managing director's wife,” says Mr Latta. “In one case, we found someone in charge of buying IT services who used a company that charged 50 per cent over the market rate and that company was run by someone she was involved with.”
As well as taking advantage of their seniority, cuckoo crooks can exploit their untouchability from central control. Subsidiaries in eastern Europe, far from headquarters and where local business practices can be rather rough and ready, are notorious for this sort of thing. Companies can take a number of steps often common sense to ensure their employees do not take on two day jobs (see box). But the fact that, according to a report by Ernst & Young published this year, 85 per cent of fraud involves an insider suggests that most companies do not do nearly enough.
提防公司“内鬼”
坐在办公桌前，人们往往会做许多工作之外的事情，比如网络购物或者找人看孩子，大多数公司都理解也接受这一现实。但有些雇员做得有点过分。他们在一间公司“工作”的同时，还为其它公司干活，甚至做起了自己的买卖。说得轻一点，他们是在偷用雇主时间。说得严重些，他们是在欺骗发薪方。
这些便是把蛋下到其它鸟窝里的“布谷鸟企业”(cuckoo business)。
“我们经常会遇到员工将客户或知识产权转往别处的情况，”安永国际会计公司(Ernst Young)全球调查项目合伙人约翰?斯玛特(John Smart)说。“这种情况通常是辞职的先兆，等他们真的离开公司便会带走一半的生意。”他继续说，具体数字很难获得，因为公司通常不会公布自己受骗的事实。种种现象表明，此类事件有增多的趋势。
斯玛特最近被一家西班牙公司录用，对一家小型英国子公司进行调查。总部听说子公司总经理在私下经营着一家企业和他们抢生意。果然，调查的结果证实，抢走业务的竞争对手正是由他妻子“经营”的一间布谷鸟企业。斯玛特说：“尽管我们无法证明什么，但他还是被解雇了。我们只能告诉他，那样做不太合适。”
Madysen是位于英国布里斯托市的一家扫描技术公司，其总经理迈克尔?帕特里克(Michael Patrick)发现自己成了此类骗局的受害者。“我有四名雇员在辞职前三个月成立了一家公司，并且开始转移业务。他们在八月份成立公司，我在十月才有所察觉。他们的公司就是我公司的翻版。”等他得知真相，这家布谷鸟公司已站稳脚跟，那些雇员也早已开始忙着转移商品和业务。帕特里克立刻同英国政府贸易工业部接洽，“但他们也无能为力”。他还同警察局联络，但也一无所获。最后，他雇了一家私营调查公司Diligentia，该公司做的事情和破案小说类似，比如监视追踪可疑对象。结果，Diligentia将其中三人送到警察局，并追回价值超过10万英镑（17.9万美元）的设备。不巧，由于一名被告在开庭前两天自杀身亡，此案件被搁置下来。帕特里克说：“这种经历很不愉快，可我必须跟踪调查他们，而且花了足足一年时间。如果我不这么做（雇佣调查人员），我的公司就完了。”
Diligentia公司总经理亨利?霍布森(Henry Hobson)表示，他大部分时间都耗在此类调查案件上。“这经常发生。”他解释说：“还遇到过股票经纪人先抽走客户再自己成立公司的情况。案件内容涉及广泛，小到雇员联合起来利用工作时间和公司资源经营其它企业，大到情节严重的诈骗和盗窃。”
正如霍布森所言，这些布谷鸟有大有小。有的盗用雇主的时间和金钱，有些则干脆利用上班时间经营自己的公司。
西蒙?道森(Simon Dawson)是一家名为风险咨询集团(Risk Advisory Group)的调查及情报咨询机构，其企业调查部主管回忆起与一家慈善机构合作的经历。“我们在信息技术部门发现了三个人。其中一个人经营着一家房产租赁公司，另一个人下载盗版软件并用公司设备进行包装，而第三个人则把大部分时间用来管理一个专为20世纪50年代科幻小说而设计的网站。”雇主面临的一个难题是：适当行为与不适当行为的界限模糊。如果雇员在eBay上出售几件古董首饰，很少有老板会抱怨。但网上拍卖会使人上瘾，一些人已将这个业余爱好升级为全力投入的事业，占去很多正常的工作时间。对那些想利用工作之便挣私钱的人来说，高科技在价格和效能方面的飞速发展让他们受益无穷。这听起来像是宣传口号，但如今人们的确可以用一台手提电脑和一部手机来经营一家公司。如果再有人支付日常经营的帐单，那么做这种生意的劲头就更大了。
可别以为所有这些都是高科技骗局。托比?拉塔(Toby Latta)是控制风险集团(Control Risks Group)的企业调查主管，该集团是一家位于伦敦的商业风险咨询机构。在托比先前任职的一家公司，打字房的生产率曾莫名其妙地下降。原因何在呢？原来员工在使用公司设备销售化妆品，并用公司电话招揽生意。还有更丑恶可耻的案件，控制风险集团曾帮助一家美国公司做调查，发现该公司的莫斯科代理在办公地点经营妓院。
显然，这种滥用职权现象在公司的任何级别都可能出现。不过，拉塔表示，犯法者通常都是较高层及任职时间较长的人，“处于受到相当信任的职位”。事实上，犯罪者往往都是人们最意料不到的人：一提起这类内部欺诈事件，大多数人都会想到收发室的职员可能会有小阴谋，或者销售人员会偷偷转移客源。
然而，犯法的常常是任职多年的中层经理，他们熟悉内部情况，而且由于是老员工，公司对他们的监督也比较松。他们为什么要这样做？原因很多。可能得不到升迁；可能家中资金紧张；或者就是闲得无聊。不管是什么情况，级别较高者所造成的损害很可能远远大于那些低层职员。
负责签合同的高层主管往往最明目张胆地滥用职权。拉塔说：“最典型的例子就是将餐饮服务的合同签给总经理夫人‘经营’的公司。有一次，我们发现一个IT设备购买人员居然挑选了一家报价比市场价高出50%的供应商，原来这个员工和供应商的老板有关联。”
除了利用资历优势，在一些距离较远、总部控制不到的地点，布谷鸟窃贼也会大钻空子。很多企业设在东欧的子公司常因发生类似事件而臭名昭著，追其原因，一个是地理位置远离总部，另外当地商业行为也不够严谨规范。企业可以在日常管理中采取一些手段避免雇员（同时）做两份日间工的现象。然而，安永国际会计公司今年发布的一份报告显示，85%的公司案件都有内部员工卷入，这表明，大多数公司采取的措施还远远不够。
