Sunday, December 27, 2015

Embezzlement - Not taking Vacation

Few days back, my manager was saying that I didn't take even one day leave (in the presence of many people). Two hours later, I was reading the following in "When to rob a bank" by Levitt and Dubner.

Geiger was arrested in 1961 for embezzling more than $2 million over many years. By the time she was arrested, Geiger was said to be exhausted. Why? Because she never took vacations. This turned out to be a key component in her crime. As the story goes, the reason she never took vacations was that she was keeping two sets of books and couldn't risk a fill-in employee discovering her embezzlement.

The most interesting part, according to the cop, is that after prison Geiger went to work for a banking oversight agency to help stop embezzlement. Her biggest contribution: looking for employees who failed to take vacation. This simple metric turned out to have strong predictive power in stopping embezzlement.