Podcasts about prosperident

In this episode, I am joined by co-host Ameena Basile. We were thrilled to speak with Marcius Bispo of SmilePass, to explore how this innovative platform is transforming dental practices. From simplifying complex payment systems to revolutionising patient loyalty through membership plans, SmilePass empowers practices to improve operational efficiency, financial management, and patient satisfaction. Find out more about SmilePass, and organise a demonstration, via their website: https://smilepass.co/During the episode, I mentioned one of my previous shows where I learned of the prevalence of dental practice theft. The guest was David Harris of Prosperident and you can watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE3VNDOqlyA&list=PL1MIigc47x9oZiFUnzP6jrRRZA6eSDIae&index=33&t=1sInterested in taking your personal, team, and dental practice to the next level? Contact Julie today to explore the possibilities for growth and success! Visit our website, Dental Business Mastery, at https://dentalbusinessmastery.com.au/, and book a complimentary, obligation-free Discovery Call to discuss your specific needs and goals. Schedule your call here: https://tidycal.com/3l298p1/30-minute-meeting If you have any questions or would like more information, feel free to contact us via email at info@dentalbusinessmastery.com.au.

In this episode, we catch up again with David Harris, CEO of Prosperident, about embezzlement in dentistry. Don't let embezzlement be something you fear in your practice. Learn to protect yourself from it instead. Listen in as we discuss:The statistics – so you know what you're up againstKey risk factors to guard yourself againstThe emotional impact of embezzlementEmbezzler behaviors to be aware ofDavid Harris is the industry's longest-standing expert in dental practice financial crimes and embezzlement investigation. Learn more about Prosperident at www.prosperident.com or give them a call at 888-398-2327. See a demo of DI and get a $50 gift card: https://get.dentalintel.net/podcast.

In this insightful episode, AGD Podcast Series host Dr. George Schmidt talks with David Harris, founder and CEO of Prosperident, the leading dental embezzlement investigation firm in the United States. Embezzlement impacts over half of all dental practitioners at some point in their careers, often with devastating financial consequences. Harris has dedicated his career to uncovering theft and empowering practice owners to protect their businesses. Harris talks through the warning signs of employee theft, the importance of balancing trust with accountability, and strategies for implementing robust systems to safeguard your practice. Whether you're a seasoned professional or new to managing a dental office, this episode includes actionable advice to help you prevent financial losses and ensure the long-term success of your practice.

The DINKs had the best time learning all the secrets to dental accounting on this live episode of Humpday Happy Hour™ with Dr. Pat Little!After leaving clinical practice due to disability, Dr. Little returned to college to complete his accounting and general business education. As both a dentist and accountant, Dr. Pat Little brings a unique blend of skill and experience to his presentations addressing practice and risk management. Through Prosperident, Dr. Little conducts embezzlement examinations and advises dentists in matters related to fraud and embezzlement. He also provides practice management coaching to dentists and their teams through Prosperident's Owner Proactive Strategies service.Away from the office, he enjoys presenting dental education courses nationwide and maintaining his high golf handicap.✨Get in touch with Dr. Little: Website: https://www.prosperident.com/Email: pat@patlittle.com

The Dental Amigos Rob and Paul are back, welcoming licensed private investigator, forensic CPA, and certified fraud examiner David Harris for a conversation about protecting your practice from financial crime. Returning guest David Harris is CEO of Prosperident, a firm dedicated to investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. Today, David walks the Amigos through the alarming danger financial criminals pose to practice owners, provides insight into the criminal's thought process in planning and executing the crime, and offers his basic formula for proactively shielding your practice from embezzlement before it happens. Listeners who want to reach David or employ his team's services can fill out his inquiry form at www.prosperident.com/dental-nachos or call Prosperident's toll-free phone number at 888-398-2327. You can also check out his definitive book on dental embezzlement, Healers Versus Stealers: How to Outsmart the Thief in Your Dental Practice. To hear more from David and the Amigos, listen to our first podcast with David by clicking here. Listeners who want to reach out to Paul can do so at Paul@DentalNachos.com and those who want to reach out to Rob can do so at Rob@RMontgomery-Law.com.

Welcome to the Golden Age of Orthodontics with Dr. Leon Klempner and co-host Amy Epstein. In this episode, we dive into a crucial yet often overlooked issue in dental and orthodontic practices—embezzlement. Today's guest is David Harris, CEO of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists, who shares eye-opening statistics on how pervasive embezzlement is in orthodontic practices. David sheds light on the behaviors of those who steal, the fine line between delegation and abdication, and the essential steps your HR department must take to protect your practice, including rigorous pre-employment screening. The key takeaway? More orthodontists will be embezzled than won't, making vigilance and proactive measures essential to safeguarding your business. Don't miss out on this information-packed episode.IN THIS EPISODE: [2:39] Amy introduces David Harris, CEO of Prosperident, a firm expert in addressing dental practice embezzlement[4:12] David explains the pervasiveness of the embezzlement problem and outlines statistics of practices who have experienced embezzlement[12:29] David discusses the difference between delegation and abdication and the behaviors of people who steal[19:31] Pre Employment screening is a must for hiring, and David shares other practices that your H.R. Department must put into place[24:23] Discussion of a proximity tag on your computer and what is the next step if someone is stealing from your practiceKEY TAKEAWAYS: More Orthodontists will be embezzled than won't.Practitioners don't have the time to monitor the bookkeeping aspect of their business, while the thief has all the time in the world to devise a plan to steal.An employee will gain your trust before they steal from you.RESOURCE LINKSPeople + Practice - Website Dr. Leon - EmailAmy - EmailPeople + Practice - EmailProsperident - WebsiteProsperident Phone Number: 888-398-2327BIOGRAPHY: David Harris may have the coolest job in dentistry - he gets to chase and catch those who steal from dentists. A rule-breaker in his youth, David changed his direction and has spent much of his adult life in the world of investigation andEnforcement, where he uses his unrivaled ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dentists. David is the Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. David is a licensed private investigator, a ForensicCertified Public Accountant and a Certified Fraud Examiner. He is the author of the definitive book on embezzlement, the most recent Healers versus Stealers: How to Outsmart the Thief in Your Dental Practice. In addition to being a prolific author, David is a frequent presenter at regional, national, and international dental conferences, and his vast wealth of experience, coupled with his keen sense of humor, makes David both an engaging and entertaining speaker.In recognition of his long and distinguished service to the dental profession, David is one of a handful of non-clinicians to be honored with a Fellowship in the International Academy of Dental Facial Esthetics.

I know first hand how hard it is to be a joyful dentist when you're dealing with embezzlement. David Harris, the CEO of Prosperident and expert on dental embezzlement joins me on this episode to discuss this topic that is unfortunately much more common than we all think. Download The Busy Dentist's Guide To Self-CareClick here to take the FREE Dentist Self Care & Burnout Assessment.Free masterclass: Make Decisions With Confidence And Stop Second Guessing YourselfSchedule a consultation with Dr. Natanya to learn more about 1:1 coaching by going to drnatanya.com/connect.Check out Dr. Natanya's website here: drnatanya.comFollow Dr. Natanya on Instagram: www.instagram.com/dr.natanyaFollow Dr. Natanya on Facebook: www.facebook.com/drnatanyaIf you find this podcast helpful, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with a friend!

In this Ortho Marketing Podcast, Dean Steinman is joined by David Harris, CEO of Prosperident. They discuss the overlooked challenges faced by dental practices in the realm of financial security. Explore the ins and outs of embezzlement within the dental industry, shedding light on the tactics employed by unscrupulous individuals and offering valuable insights to fortify your practice against potential threats.Ready to elevate your practice? Contact us!https://orthomarketing.com/contact-us/About David HarrisDavid Harris may have the coolest job in dentistry - he gets to chase, and catch, those who steal from dentists. A rule-breaker in his youth, David changed his direction and has spent much of his adult life in the world of investigation and enforcement, where he uses his unrivaled ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dentists. David is the Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. David is a licensed private investigator, a Forensic Certified Public Accountant, and a Certified Fraud Examiner. He is the author of two books on embezzlement, the most recent of which, Healers versus Stealers: How to Outsmart the Thief in Your Dental Practice, was released in August 2023. In addition to being a prolific author, David is a frequent presenter at regional, national, and international dental conferences, and his vast wealth of experience, coupled with his keen sense of humor, makes David both an engaging and entertaining speaker.

In this Ortho Marketing Podcast, Dean Steinman is joined by David Harris, CEO of Prosperident. They discuss the overlooked challenges faced by dental practices in the realm of financial security. Explore the ins and outs of embezzlement within the dental industry, shedding light on the tactics employed by unscrupulous individuals and offering valuable insights to fortify your practice against potential threats.Ready to elevate your practice? Contact us!https://orthomarketing.com/contact-us/About David HarrisDavid Harris may have the coolest job in dentistry - he gets to chase, and catch, those who steal from dentists. A rule-breaker in his youth, David changed his direction and has spent much of his adult life in the world of investigation and enforcement, where he uses his unrivaled ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dentists. David is the Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. David is a licensed private investigator, a Forensic Certified Public Accountant, and a Certified Fraud Examiner. He is the author of two books on embezzlement, the most recent of which, Healers versus Stealers: How to Outsmart the Thief in Your Dental Practice, was released in August 2023. In addition to being a prolific author, David is a frequent presenter at regional, national, and international dental conferences, and his vast wealth of experience, coupled with his keen sense of humor, makes David both an engaging and entertaining speaker.

In this episode of The Dental Economist Show, host Mike Huffaker is joined by David Harris, Founder and CEO of Prosperident. Join them as they discuss the prevalence of embezzlement in dental practices and share insights on how dentists can protect themselves. David covers topics such as the importance of hiring the right people, conducting thorough background checks, and implementing software systems with strong audit trail capabilities.

‍‍What does it take to run a successful dental practice in a small town? Dive into today's episode, as I sit down with Dr. Kim Power, embracing the journey of owning and operating her bustling practice in a rural region of North Carolina. Through her resilience and determination, Dr. Kim navigates us through the challenges and triumphs, from staff shortages, to unexpected challenges, and even embezzlement - offering an incredibly honest take on what it takes to grow a thriving practice despite all odds. She goes beyond the surface, offering insider knowledge on efficient systems investments, hiring tenacious staff, and the significance of maintaining a supportive office culture while detailing her transition from orthodontics to general dentistry.This episode is filled to the brim with practical wisdom from someone who truly walked the talk. Whether you are thinking of running your own practice or just curious about what it takes to succeed in a challenging environment, Dr. Kim's experience is sure to leave you with meaningful insights and valuable lessons that can be applied in your practice.What You'll Learn in This Episode:How Dr. Kim transitioned from Orthodontics to General Dentistry.Dealing with an unexpected path to owning a practice.The acquisition process and financial considerations.The importance of creating a positive work culture.How to overcome embezzlement within a practice.Managing a growing practice and delegating tasks.Dealing with personal challenges while managing a practice.Don't wait, tune in now, and gain valuable knowledge from Dr. Kim's unique journey and experiences in practice ownership!‍‍Guest: Dr. Kim PowerPractice Name: Smithfield Family DentistCheck out Kim's Media:Website: https://smithfieldfamilydentist.com/Email: kimpower9515@gmail.comPhone: 919-418-0538‍Other Mentions and Links:‍Software/Services:Open DentalNadapaymentsProsperidentCommunity/Groups:Triangle Dental Solutions GroupEstablishments/Brands:AmazonFirst Citizens BankSouthern First BankInsurance Companies:AetnaCignaMetLife‍Host: Michael Arias‍Website: The Dental Marketer Join my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/‍Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer Society‍Please don't forget to share with us on Instagram when you are listening to the podcast AND if you are really wanting to show us love, then please leave a 5 star review on iTunes! [Click here to leave a review on iTunes]‍p.s. Some links are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that we have experience with these products/ company, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions we make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money unless you feel you need them or that they will help you with your goals.‍

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with David Harris, an expert in dental embezzlement prevention from Prosperident. David and I discussed the alarming issue of embezzlement within dental practices, its red flags, and the essential steps to prevent it from happening to your practice.If you would like to contact David, go to the Prosperident website here: https://www.prosperident.com/Interested in taking your personal, team, and dental practice to the next level? Contact Julie today to explore the possibilities for growth and success!Visit our website, Dental Business Mastery, at https://dentalbusinessmastery.com.au/, and book a complimentary, obligation-free Discovery Call to discuss your specific needs and goals. Schedule your call here: https://tidycal.com/3l298p1/30-minute-meetingOur website is also packed with valuable information, free tools, and resources to support you on your journey. Be sure to check it out!If you have any questions or would like more information, feel free to contact us via email at info@dentalbusinessmastery.com.au.Interested in taking your personal, team, and dental practice to the next level? Contact Julie today to explore the possibilities for growth and success! Visit our website, Dental Business Mastery, at https://dentalbusinessmastery.com.au/, and book a complimentary, obligation-free Discovery Call to discuss your specific needs and goals. Schedule your call here: https://tidycal.com/3l298p1/30-minute-meeting Our website is also packed with valuable information, free tools, and resources to support you on your journey. Be sure to check it out! If you have any questions or would like more information, feel free to contact us via email at info@dentalbusinessmastery.com.au.

Today, we have David Harris from Prosperident on the show. In this episode, we are talking all about embezzlement and ways you can avoid it in your practice. It is easy to think it can never happen to you, but the reality is it could happen to any of us. Which is why I thought it would be so amazing to bring the topic to light here on Hey Docs! Let's get into it! https://www.prosperident.com/https://www.facebook.com/Prosperident.Investigators https://www.linkedin.com/company/prosperident/ SummaryIn this conversation, David Harris, CEO of Prosperident, discusses the issue of embezzlement in dental practices. He highlights the prevalence of embezzlement in the industry and the lack of clear signs that indicate an employee may be stealing. David emphasizes the importance of implementing safeguards, such as conducting criminal records checks and drug testing during the hiring process. He also stresses the need for dentists to actively review their practice management software and reconcile collections with deposits to detect any discrepancies. David advises dentists to seek professional help if they suspect embezzlement and cautions against taking immediate action without proper investigation. In this episode, David Harris discusses the importance of taking action and avoiding suspicions when dealing with embezzlement in dental practices. He emphasizes the seriousness of the issue and the potential risks involved. He also provides advice on reaching out for professional help and shares his contact information. The episode concludes with a speed round and a discussion about outdoor activities and David's involvement in search and rescue. David shares his desire to be remembered as a great father and the best piece of advice he has received. TakeawaysEmbezzlement is a prevalent issue in dental practices, with approximately 70% of dentists experiencing it at some point in their careers.Implementing safeguards during the hiring process, such as conducting criminal records checks and drug testing, can help prevent embezzlement.Regularly reviewing practice management software and reconciling collections with deposits is crucial for detecting and preventing embezzlement.If embezzlement is suspected, it is important to seek professional help and conduct a thorough investigation before taking legal action. If you suspect embezzlement in your dental practice, it is important to take immediate action and avoid telegraphing your suspicions to the person you suspect.Embezzlement can have serious consequences, and it is important to seek professional help to navigate the situation and avoid potential risks.David Harris can be reached for a no-cost, no-obligation consultation through his toll-free number or website.David's involvement in outdoor activities and search and rescue highlights his passion for helping others and making a positive impact.Connect With Our Advertisers Kaleidoscope - Orthodontic Digital Marketing GreyFinch - Web Based Practice Management SoftwareSmileSuite - Customizable Presentation Software and Post-Consultation Follow-Up Chapters00:00 Introduction and Background03:30 Red Flags for Embezzlement06:00 Case Study: Office Manager Embezzlement08:17 The Paradox of Embezzlement09:30 Safeguards for Protecting Against Embezzlement12:08 Importance of Correlating Collections and Deposits13:40 Different Forms of Embezzlement19:24 Recognizing and Responding to Embezzlement30:18 Engaging Professional Help35:02 Preserving Evidence and Taking Legal Action38:42 Taking Action and Avoiding Suspicions39:23 The Seriousness of Embezzlement40:15 Reaching Out for Help41:43 Wrap Up and Contact Information41:59 Speed Round43:15 Outdoor Activities and Search and Rescue43:29 Desire to be Remembered43:47 Best Piece of Advice Are you ready to start a practice of your own? Do you need a fresh set of eyes or some advice in your existing practice? Reach out to me- www.practiceresults.com. If you like what we are doing here on Hey Docs! and want to hear more of this awesome content, give us a 5-star Rating on your preferred listening platform and subscribe to our show so you never miss an episode. New episodes drop every Thursday! Episode Credits:Hosted by Jill Allen Produced by Jordann KillionAudio Engineering by Johnny Mitchell

David Harris has one of the most interesting jobs in dentistry. When office managers, staff members, or business partners steal from dental practices, it's his job to uncover the embezzlement, stop the crime, and document the evidence needed to fire and convict the perpetrators. After doing that job for more than 30 years, he's seen and done it all. Today, David is the Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. As a licensed private investigator, a Forensic Certified Public Accountant, and a Certified Fraud Examiner, he is the author of two books on embezzlement, and a frequent presenter at regional, national, and international dental conferences. We'll ask him: What are some instances of dental embezzlement that he has personally uncovered? Why are dental practices such easy targets for thieves? What are some red flags that might indicate theft is taking place in your practice? How should a dentist respond if they think embezzlement is happening in their practice? What are some common-sense best practices to prevent theft? Are you ready to take the next step in scaling up your practice ownership dreams? Visit getprovide.com.

In this episode of Financial Flossing, host Ross Brannon interviews guest David Harris, an expert in dental embezzlement and CEO of Prosperident. They discuss the prevalence of embezzlement in dental practices, standard methods used by embezzlers, and steps dentists can take to prevent and detect embezzlement. David shares insights into the behavioral markers of embezzlers, the importance of hiring practices, the role of forensic investigations, and practical tips for dentists to safeguard their practices. Key Takeaways:  ✅ Embezzlement is a significant issue in dental practices, with a 70% chance of occurrence.  ✅ Common methods of embezzlement include manipulating financial records, diverting payments, and stealing tangible assets like dental supplies or gold restorations.  ✅ Behavioral markers of embezzlers include a desire for alone time, conspicuous display of honesty, cutting ethical corners, and a different thought process regarding territoriality.  ✅ Dentists should implement stringent hiring practices, including criminal background checks, drug testing, and reference checks.  ✅ Regular monitoring is crucial to detect embezzlement, such as reviewing daily reports from practice management software and comparing collections to deposits.  ✅ Dentists should better build relationships with their staff to understand their personal situations and potential red flags.  ✅ If embezzlement is suspected, it is essential to seek professional help from experts in dental forensic investigation.  ✅ Prosperident provides forensic investigation services and can be contacted at 888-398-2327 or through their website, prosperident.com. More about David:  Forensic Accountant, Certified Fraud Examiner, Certified in Financial Forensics, Licensed Private Investigator, CPA.  Entertaining and in-demand speaker. Keynote presentation: "How To Outsmart An Embezzler." Expert witness in fraud and embezzlement against dentists and dental specialists. A published author and expert on the subject of embezzlement in dental offices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Harris, Prosperident Inc. (Dental Business Radio, Episode 46) Forensic CPA and licensed private investigator David Harris is CEO of Prosperident Inc., a firm that investigates embezzlement in dental practice environments. David and host Patrick O’Rourke discussed how theft happens, how Prosperident investigates potential embezzlement, the profiles and methods of embezzlers, the challenges of hiring, […] The post David Harris, Prosperident Inc. appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

David Harris, Prosperident Inc. (Dental Business Radio, Episode 46) Forensic CPA and licensed private investigator David Harris is CEO of Prosperident Inc., a firm that investigates embezzlement in dental practice environments. David and host Patrick O’Rourke discussed how theft happens, how Prosperident investigates potential embezzlement, the profiles and methods of embezzlers, the challenges of hiring, […]

Within the hallowed halls of orthodontic offices, where smiles are crafted, a dark secret lurks. Behind the reassuring facade of bright lights, an insidious crime silently takes root, preying upon the unsuspecting orthodontists who serve our communities.Welcome to the world of dental embezzlement, a phenomenon so pervasive that it rivals a pandemic in its potential impact.As startling statistics reveal, dentistry is the MOST embezzled profession, with orthodontists finding themselves as particularly enticing targets for these audacious thieves.Embezzlement is a pervasive issue that can impact any orthodontic practice.In this episode, I am joined by David Harris of Prosperident to talk about the shocking truth about dental embezzlement, from the staggering amounts stolen to the unnerving fact that these misdeeds often go undetected for years.Mr. Harris is a Certified Fraud Examiner and a licensed private investigator and will be speaking at the OP summit.Prepare to have your eyes opened and your understanding challenged as we delve into the depths of this hidden menace that will affect a majority of orthodontists in their lifetimes.As he puts it, there are only two types of orthodontists, those who already know they've been embezzled and those who'll eventually find out.Tune in to understand the motivations behind embezzlement and take proactive measures to safeguard your practice!Key Takeaways- David's background and how he ended up where he is (01:58)- How to prevent people from picking your lock (03:13)- Embezzlement is driven by ego and narcissism (09:12)- How not to hire someone with a criminal record (10:25)- About 85% of revenue theft in orthodontics is on the revenue side (15:25)- The most common reasons why people embezzle (20:59)- The percentage of embezzlers who end up going to jail (25:24)- Simple rules for hiring (28:42)- Don't give out get out of jail free cards (33:34)Additional Resources

In this episode, we discuss embezzlement in the dental practice.  "Embezzlement happens when dentists don't understand the business of the front desk and don't monitor their production/collections and adjustments everyday. eAssist is another set of eyes on your accounts and it provides timely practice management reports so that you can protect your hard earned revenue." - David Harris, CPA, CMA, MBA, CFE, CFFOriginal air date: 9/22/21Join our Facebook Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dentistsintheknow/

Hear Dr. Deborah Staten and Prosperident ace investigator Scott Clifford discuss how embezzler Danielle Powers stole over $250,000 from Dr. Staten, went on to embezzle from another dentist, and is currently serving an 8-year prison sentence. The most powerful element of this story is the advice Dr. Staten has for other dentists to help them escape what happened to her.

Listen to David Harris from Prosperident, Adrienne Twigg from Bent Ericksen and Erik Pook from Cirrus Group discuss some of the perils that dental practices face including embezzlement, poor hiring decisions, and oppressive premises lease terms.

How To Make a Dentist's Life EasierEpisode #563 with David HarrisOver your career as a dentist, the chances of being embezzled is about 70%. So, what can you do to lower that risk? To share some answers, Kirk Behrendt brings back David Harris, embezzlement expert and CEO of Prosperident, with four best practices to prevent embezzlers from stealing your time and money. Put systems in place so embezzlement doesn't happen to you! For tips to make life as a dentist a little bit easier, listen to Episode 563 of The Best Practices Show!Episode Resources:Prosperident: https://www.prosperident.comCall Prosperident: (888) 398-2327David's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidharrisprosperidentDavid's social media: @davidharris9406Subscribe to the Best Practices Show PodcastJoin ACT's To The Top Study ClubJoin ACT's Master ClassSee our Live Events Schedule hereGet the Best Practices Magazine for Free!Write a Review on iTunesLinks Mentioned in This Episode:**Email David for a free copy of his Embezzlement Risk Self-Assessment Questionnaire: https://www.prosperident.com/contact-usProsperident's Hall of Shame: https://www.prosperident.com/hall-of-shameDental Embezzlement: The Art of Theft and the Science of Control by David Harris: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dental-embezzlement-david-harris/1134016570Previous Best Practices Show episodes with David: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=act+dental+david+harrisMain Takeaways:Prevention is better than the cure.Check collections and deposits monthly.Remember to check your day-end reports.Track any financial discrepancies with a graph.Learn to use your practice management software!Your team doesn't need access to bank statements.You should be delegating to your team, not abdicating.Quotes:“The chance that a dentist will be embezzled in his or her career is around 70% . . . So, it's not a problem that affects a small corner of dentistry somewhere. The majority of dentists will be embezzled. Sometimes, it's taking tens from the office, or a few thousand dollars, or maybe scrap gold from the gold jar. And sometimes, it's over $1 million dollars.” (4:14—4:44)“About half of those who get embezzled once will be embezzled again. And about half of those will be embezzled again.” (4:49—4:59)“Most dental offices don't have really good control systems, and that means that...

Preventing Embezzlement in Your Dental Practice: What Every Dentist Should KnowEpisode #560 with Amber Weber-GonzalesAlmost half of all dentists will experience embezzlement in their careers. What's worse, it can happen more than once! You need safeguards in place, and Kirk Behrendt brings in Amber Weber-Gonzales, head of Prosperident's Proactive Services Group, to share their best practices to help you protect your business. Your practice is like your patients' oral health — be proactive and preventative to keep it healthy! To learn more about deterring embezzlement and catching it early, listen to Episode 560 of The Best Practices Show!Episode Resources:Amber's email: amber.weber@prosperident.com David Harris, CEO of Prosperident: (888) 398-2327Subscribe to the Best Practices Show PodcastJoin ACT's To The Top Study ClubJoin ACT's Master ClassSee our Live Events Schedule hereGet the Best Practices Magazine for Free!Write a Review on iTunesLinks Mentioned in This Episode:Prosperident: https://www.prosperident.comLastPass: https://www.lastpass.comMain Takeaways:Trust and verify.Create a process of transparency.Know which key reports to focus on.Implement a solid end-of-day process.Do your due diligence before hiring anyone.Learn the common red flags of an embezzler.Practice good habits with passwords and emails.Quotes:“Almost 50% of dentists, at least one time in their profession, their career, will have embezzlement occur. It's a large number. And it doesn't usually occur just one time. In our experience at Prosperident, of those 50% that have embezzlement occur, 11% of dentists who had it occur, it happens twice. Four or more times, we see about 8% of repeat clients of the ones who've already had it occur. So, it's not a one-and-done type scenario. It's a recurring, revolving door, especially with the change in staff and things like that. So, there's a 50% chance it's going to happen to you. We're seeing those statistics come up from what they used to be, sometimes in the 60, 70 percentiles.” (4:16—5:07)“The majority of cases where we find theft or embezzlement is from a long-term, trusted employee. And part of that is you build a relationship, the psychology behind it. It's almost like your work-marriage type scenario. And so, yes, Sally's been there for 25 years. You trust, but sometimes forget the verification part. That's one of the things that I oversee with Prosperident, is we really want to teach practice owners how to have transparency with their team members, whether they've been there for 20 years, or two years, or two months.” (6:06—6:44)“Trust but verify. That's one of the biggest sayings that has been instilled in me. I think that comes from my ranching background in Wyoming. You're out there and...

If you don't believe fraud will happen at your practice, you're not paying attention to the high number of dentists who get embezzled by a staff member. On this episode of the Dentist Money™ Show, Ryan talks about fraud in the dental industry with David Harris, founder of Prosperident, a forensic investigation firm that specializes in protecting dentists from financial crimes. Need answers to your financial questions but not ready for a full-service wealth manager? Check out our new Dentist Money Membership program. Are you ready to fully outsource your financial planning and investment management to a financial advisor who specializes in working with dentists? Check out our Private Wealth Management service.  

Hear Virginia orthodontist Dr. David Hughes describe his experience with being the victim of a major embezzlement carried out by his trusted office manager.  Prosperident hosts David Harris, Wendy Askins and Amber Weber-Gonzales participate in this fascinating discussion with Dr. Hughes.  

Listen to Prosperident's hosts David Harris, Wendy Askins and Amber Weber as they play host to special guest Mr. Emmet Scott. Emmet is both the CEO of a 70-practice DSO and the voice of the DSO industry. 

In this episode, Emmet is joined by Dr. Brett Wells, Founder of DentalHQ, and David Harris, Founder/CEO of Prosperident to discuss how prevalent embezzlement is in the dental profession and how you can combat it. They cover how an in-house membership plan helps prevent embezzlement. Dr. Wells and David also share their 5 accounting best practices to ensure the success of your membership plan, fraud/embezzlement signs to look for, how technology can help, and more. For More Info Visit: https://www.dentalhq.com/ Email: eric@dentalhq.com

Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer SocietyJoin my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/[Click here to leave a review on iTunes]‍‍Guest: David HarrisBusiness Name: ProsperidentCheck out David's Media:‍Phone: 888-398-2327‍Host: Michael Arias‍Website: The Dental Marketer Join my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/‍Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer SocietyMy Key Takeaways:Usually three conditions need to be met for someone to steal: Pressure, Opportunity, and Rationalization.Don't take shortcuts when hiring! Remember to check your state laws, and run background, drug, and credit history reports accordingly.Try asking for multiple forms of identification at the first interview to rule out identity theft.You are the business owner, so be sure to generate and check the end of day reports yourself!Sometimes the most trusted of employees will find a way to rationalize stealing money or altering data.If you suspect someone on your team is stealing, do not confront them immediately! Call a professional.‍Please don't forget to share with us on Instagram when you are listening to the podcast AND if you are really wanting to show us love, then please leave a 5 star review on iTunes! [Click here to leave a review on iTunes]‍Our Sponsors & Their Exclusive Deals:CARESTACK | Cloud-Based Dental SoftwareSCHEDULE A FREE DEMO TODAY!Click the link below and get 1 MONTH FOR FREE + 10% OFF your Annual Subscription + 50% OFF Your Set-up Fee!Check out CARESTACK now: https://lp.carestack.org/thedentalmarketer‍‍‍Dandy | The Fully Digital, US-based Dental Lab‍For a completely FREE 3Shape Trios 3 scanner & $250 in lab credit click here: meetdandy.com/tdm !‍‍‍Mango Voice | The best VoIP phones for small business with top software integrations & in-house customer support.Click here for Mango Voice's completely FREE startup package!ORClick here to get 3 FREE MONTHS with Mango Voice‍Thank you for supporting the podcast by checking out our sponsors!

What Most People Get Wrong About Embezzlement Episode #446 with David Harris If you think embezzlement can never happen to you, take time to think again! No one is immune, and it's impossible to prevent. All you can do is make it more challenging for the people who choose to steal. And to help you in that process, Kirk Behrendt brings back David Harris, CEO of Prosperident, to debunk common myths about thieves and embezzlement so you can outsmart them and reduce your chances of theft. Cash isn't the only thing an embezzler will take! To learn ways to protect your practice, listen to Episode 446 of The Best Practices Show! Main Takeaways: No dentist is immune to embezzlement. 75% of dentists are stolen from at some point. Embezzlers may be smarter than you think. Think beyond cash theft. Thieves will adapt. Make it challenging to steal from your practice. Always reach out to an expert for help. Quotes: “In 2019, [the American Dental Association] went to [17,000] dentists and they said, ‘Have you been stolen from?' And I'll give you the good news first. 53% of the respondents said, ‘I don't think so,' because this question doesn't always lead itself to absolute answers. Of course, the other 47% had been stolen from. So, the ADA asked them a follow-up question, ‘Okay, how many times?' And now, it got a little bit interesting. 26% — so, about half of those who said they've been stolen from — said, ‘Once, as far as I know.' 11%, twice. 2%, three times. And the one that really made me stand up and take notice was that 8% of the respondents said, ‘Four or more times.'” (3:55—4:44) “Some things that we don't know here. For example, we don't know how many of the 53% [from the ADA study who] said, ‘I haven't been stolen from, to the best of my knowledge,' will get victimized in the rest of their careers. And we don't know how many of the other 47% who had been will get stolen from again. We also don't know how many people were stolen from and just didn't realize it, or how many were stolen from and did realize it, and for whatever reason, chose not to disclose that to the ADA.” (5:07—5:37) “If you start with 100 dentists, probably 75% of them will get stolen from sooner or later.” (5:41—5:46) “[Embezzlement] is not a crime committed on you by a stranger. It's a crime committed by somebody who you had a relationship with, you were almost like family to. And they used the trust and the faith that you placed in them and leveraged it into theft. So, it's a very personal crime. The money is an issue — it has to be. But in a lot of cases, it's the sense of violation. It's that thought process where you say, ‘I was at her daughter's wedding three months ago. And it's just starting to occur to me how much of that wedding I paid for.' It's that, that really hurts.” (7:09—7:52) “The first thing [dentists get wrong about embezzlement] is, ‘I have immunity because . . .' And if we had a live audience with us today, there'd be some people sitting like this with their arms folded and their face tight. You could probably even see them bruxing a little bit. And what it all says is, ‘Well, it might be the person to my left, and it might be the person to my right. But it won't be me.' And then, they have some algorithm that they've constructed that puts them in the immune category. For example, ‘My staff have been with me for 20-plus years.' And every embezzlement has a first time. Sometimes, it's a newly hired staff member who's been with you for three months. And sometimes, it's your office manager of 25 years.” (8:30—9:18) “We can't control the external pressures that are exerted onto somebody that makes them wake up one morning and say, ‘Today's the day I'm going to steal.' And the backstory could be a lot of things.” (9:20—9:31) “I've seen both sides of it where somebody who you think is almost too stupid to tie their shoes can successfully steal. And at the same time, you see some pretty creative, inventive thieves who come up...

In this episode of Practice Growth HQ we hear some pretty shocking stories about how dental practice staff can steal money from right under your nose.  You'll meet David Harris, Founder of Prosperident, the world's largest firm providing dental embezzlement investigation services to dentists and dental specialists.  In this episode, you'll discover the shocking statistics of how many dental practices are affected by embezzlement, the signs you need to be looking out for, and the practical steps you can take to minimize your risk of becoming a victim.      If you have a feeling someone might be stealing from you, or you're simply curious about some of the tactics staff can use to steal, you'll find this episode riveting!

DSO Secrets Podcast host Ken Kaufman interviews Prosperident's David Harris, Wendy Askins, and Amber Weber about the challenges facing Dental Support Organizations when hiring staff.

David Harris discusses how best to screen, interview and hire new staff with an eye toward avoiding and minimizing the risk of embezzlement. David Harris may have the coolest job in dentistry - he gets to chase, and catch, those who steal from dentists. A rule-breaker in his youth, David changed his direction and has spent much of his adult life in the world of investigation and enforcement, where he uses his unrivaled ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dentists. David is the Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. David is a licensed private investigator, a Forensic Certified Public Accountant, and a Certified Fraud Examiner. He is the author of the book Dental Embezzlement: The Art of Theft and the Science of Control and over 30 articles in dental publications. In addition to being a prolific author, David is a frequent presenter at regional, national, and international dental conferences, and his vast wealth of experience, coupled with his keen sense of humor, make David both an engaging and entertaining speaker. The Dental Clinical Companion Podcast (DCCP) is provided for general informational purposes only. The DCCP, MounceEndo, LLC, Dr. Joel Fransen, Richmond Endodontics CA, and Dr. Richard Mounce personally have no liability for any clinical, management, or financial decisions or actions taken or made by you based on the information provided in this program. The DCCP is not intended to offer dental, medical, legal, management, investment, surgical, tax, clinical, or any other professional advice. Reliance on the information in the DCCP is done entirely at the listeners own risk.  No guarantees, representations, or warrantees are made with regard to the completeness, accuracy, and/or quality of the DCCP.  The DCCP takes no responsibility for, does not endorse, and does not imply a relationship/affiliation to any websites, products, services, devices, individuals, organizations which are hyperlinked to any DCCP component or mentioned in the DCCP. Third party materials, hyperlinks, and/or DCCP content does not reflect the opinions, standards, and policies of MounceEndo, LLC (owner of the DCCP, Dr. Richard Mounce, the guest, or show sponsors). The DCCP makes no warranty that the Podcast and its server are free of computer viruses or other destructive or contaminating code elements. The Dental Clinical Companion Podcast expressly disclaims any and all liability or responsibility for any direct, indirect, incidental, special consequential or other damages arising out of any individuals use of, reference to, reliance on, or inability to use, this podcast or the information presented in this podcast. Support the show (http://mounceendo.com/)

Connect with David Harris and his team: https://www.prosperident.com/Join the discussion on Facebook!TranscriptJonathan VanHorn:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones. Some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey. Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors. We are not your CPA's. This is two CPA's talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. A very important piece for you to understand.Jonathan VanHorn:Another thing that you need to know is if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group. So we've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today, to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share? Join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there. Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering it around our topics of discussion, to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. So if you'd like access to that whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word tooth and coin, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444.Jonathan VanHorn:Again, that's toothandcoin, all one word, no spaces to 33444. Reply with your email address and we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group, as well as our digital list, to be able to send you those resources when they're available. And if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well. So onto today's episode, hope you enjoy it.Jonathan VanHorn:Hello, ambitious dentists today on the Tooth and Coin podcast we have with us, an old friend of mine. It's one of the few people in dentistry I've actually physically met. And that is Mr. David Harris. He is with Prosperident. Basically, if you want to talk about dental fraud, he is the world's leading expert. If someone came up to me randomly on the street and said, "Hey, we're going to have a fight over dental fraud. You've got to pick your horse." David would be my horse. There wouldn't be any doubt about it.Jonathan VanHorn:And David, being a friend of the podcast, listen to our episode, I think it was episode number four. And he was like, "Hey, if you guys ever want to talk to someone who actually does fraud every day, multiple times a day and lives in this world, I'd be happy to have a conversation with you." Joseph and I said, "Of course." You're the best at it. We're going to talk to you about it. We're going to ask you questions. We're happy to have you on. So again, David Harris with Prosperident, dentalembezzlement.com. They are dentistry's embezzlement experts and we're really lucky to have him on the episode. So David, thanks so much for coming on.David Harris:Oh, great to be with you, Jonathan and great to see you again. I will make one clarification. You said I do fraud every day, that's not true. I investigate fraud everyday.Jonathan VanHorn:Okay.David Harris:Other people do it. I just keep score.Jonathan VanHorn:Well you're more involved in that world than we are. I'll say that much. So a big problem we're talking about today on the grand scale is fraud. We hope that we're going to be able to talk a little bit about the how, the why, and the what is being done in the fraud world right now, so that David can really give us in the trenches information about how to combat this and like why people steal money. For a lot of us out there, you don't really think about that being... I'm personally a very trusting person. I want to trust people as much as I can. And so that concept of someone else is willing to just take stuff from me is completely foreign, it's something that I almost just block out in my head because I want to trust people. So David, why don't we start with that? Like, why do people steal from dentist?David Harris:Well, you said a Jonathan, everybody wants to trust people. And just for this conversation, I'd like to be a little more precise in our terminology. You mentioned fraud a couple of times. What I really want to talk about is embezzlement. And embezzlement means somebody who's in a position of trust, like an office manager, or maybe a bookkeeper, possibly another dentist in the practice, stealing from the practice owner. So embezzlement is really the conversation. Your question was, why do people steal? And they steal for two reasons, which I'm going to call need and greed. So needy people have their backs against the wall financially. There's something going on in their life that has meant that there's more money going out of their household each month than coming in. And unless you're a government somewhere, you can't sustain that for very long.David Harris:And at some point they've borrowed all the money they can from friends and they're two months behind in their mortgage payment and the bank is about to kick them out and they steal. And they feel bad about it, but they just don't think they have any choice. And there could be a lot of causes. It might be somebody who's going through a divorce. It might be a situation where you have one spouse working in the dental practice and the other spouse has lost their job. Maybe there's an addiction, but there's something happening that's kind of upset the family finances and they're stealing to keep themselves afloat. And then you have the greedy people and they're a little bit different. They're really stealing to address an ego deficit more than a financial one. So they think basically that they're worth far more than what society thinks they're worth and they're stealing to make up what they perceive as that difference.David Harris:So this is the person who looks at their dentist as basically a high functioning moron with good hands and in their mind the only reason the dentist is successful is because this person keeps their chair full and then when their patients leave, collects the money. And some of them, Jonathan will even construct a partnership in their own heads between themselves and the dentist that doesn't exist anywhere else, but in their mind. And then they're not in their mind stealing, they're just taking what they think they should have in the first place.Jonathan VanHorn:You wouldn't have this money if I wasn't collecting it so I should obviously get 5% of it. Right.David Harris:Yeah. And when you talk about the fraud triangle, which I know you guys have covered previously, I mean the third leg of the triangle is rationalization. And rationalization is when you say to yourself, "I know that in general stealing is wrong. However, it's okay in this case, because..." And then whatever comes after that, because is the rationalization. And one of the rationalizations that we see is called the metaphor of the ledger. And what that says is my value to the practice is much higher than what the doctor's paying me so I'm entitled to the balance. And early in our careers, no, we've learned at age three that stealing is wrong. And rationalization is where you suspend reality for a minute when you say, but it's okay here, because.Jonathan VanHorn:So in terms of like you dealing with the people that have the need or the greed, I mean, is there a defining factor in these people that you guys catch?David Harris:Well, yes. It is the most trusted person in the office because people who you don't trust have a far more difficult time embezzling from you than somebody who you do trust. So Jonathan, if I'm working for you and my plan is to embezzle, I worm my way in your family. I'll be the staff member who will babysit your kids for you, or we'll run your personal errands on my lunch hour because what I want you to think is, "Gosh, I would be so screwed if Sally ever left." And you mentioned trust early on, let's circle back to trust for a minute because the way that humans handle trust is interesting. When you first meet somebody, you do this assessment process of can I trust them? And if the answer is yes, then you lock this away in a closet. You never revisit it.Jonathan VanHorn:It's true.David Harris:And in the world, in which I live trust needs to be a little more fluid concept. And we need to kind of pull that out of the closet periodically and say, okay, I know that I could trust this person two years ago, but are they still deserving of my trust? And it just isn't human nature to do that. And that's when people get into trouble. Dentists' are people of science and healers and altruists, and they really like you want to trust everybody. And unfortunately, I see the consequences of extending trust and never re-examining it.Jonathan VanHorn:How many people do you trust David? That's what I really want to know is how many that you trust.David Harris:Well, I used to trust my mother and my father, but my mother passed away so I'm down to one.Jonathan VanHorn:Hmm. That's funny. And I noticed you didn't mention marriage or anything like that [inaudible 00:09:03].David Harris:Well, I had this argument with somebody once and what I said to him was "Your mother will always be your mother, your spouse may not always be your spouse."Jonathan VanHorn:Do you ever find spouses stealing from dentists?David Harris:We do actually a lot more than you would expect. And usually of course, it's an antecedent to divorce. So I'm married to a dentist and I'm about to divorce them. And I go see one of those horrible creatures called a divorce attorney and the divorce attorney says, "Okay, David, where does your money come from?" And I say, "Well, I worked for my wife, the dentist, and she pays me a salary." And the attorney says to me, "Okay, so when you tell your wife that you're trading her in on a newer model, what do you think her response is going to be?"David Harris:And I say, "Well, I'll be careful to do it somewhere where there are no sharp objects around, but I guess after that she's probably going to take me off the payroll." And the attorney says, "Okay, David, so I'm not going to tell you how to do this, but I'm going to tell you what you have to do. You're going to need to find a new place to live. You're going to have to buy groceries and not least importantly, you're going to have to pay me your blood-sucking divorce attorney. So you need some money under the mattress." And you know how this story is going to end Jonathon.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. Well, here's a business bank account that's got $200,000 maybe I should move half of the money into account that's in my name or something like that because I know where the buttons are on the bank website.David Harris:We have broken the news to a number of dentists that your marriage is probably in trouble and here's how I know that. We've caught somebody with their hand in your cookie jar and you're married to them.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. Yeah. So we've talked a little bit about why people steal. Let's talk a bit more about real world we're coming in and you're a dentist and your a new practice ownerish, or you've been practicing for a little bit, or you're about to become a practice owner or whatever it may be. What are the risks associated with this? What happens in the real world whenever practices are embezzled from?David Harris:It's a little tough to give you precise numbers and here's why. There's a lot of under-reporting that happens. So there's some embezzlement that never gets detected and we can't quantify that. There's also some embezzlement that gets found by the doctor and it gets for whatever reason swept under the nearest carpet, it doesn't make its way into the statistics either. And again, we can't quantify that. When we look at what we do know the best numbers I can give you came from a study The American Dental Association did in 2018, and the results were published in 2019.David Harris:So what the ADA did was they asked 17,000 dentists, have you been embezzled? And of course this isn't a question that lends itself to absolutes. The good news is 53% of the respondents said, "I don't think so." So 47% had been embezzled. And then the next thing the ADA did was they went back and asked the 47%, "Okay. How many times?" And 27% of all the respondents, in other words about half the people who said yes, said "As far as I know, once." And the remainder were somewhere between two and more than four times. And if you did a interesting little exercise, I took 27% the number of who said yes, once that I know off times one and 11% had said two times that I know of so I multiplied 11 by two, and I think it was around 2% that said three times and so on. So I multiplied the percentage times the frequency and what you got was if you sat a hundred dentists in a room that group had already had 93 embezzlements.David Harris:The other unknown here is how many of the 53% who said, "No. As far as I know, I've never been embezzled", will get hit in the rest of their careers and you there's a pretty good chance that they will. Here's what your clients should take away from this. There's probably realistically an 80% chance that your client will at some point in their 30 odd year career gets stolen from them. The other question is how much money gets stolen? And the answers there come from our case files and the average amount in our case files is about $109,000.Jonathan VanHorn:So is that 109 or a 190?David Harris:One zero nine. One more thing before we leave that question. So I mentioned this study had its results released in 2019. In 2007, so 12 years earlier, the ADA did a very similar study. And in that survey, 35% of dentists reported being embezzled. So from 2007 to 2019, the number of dentists reporting embezzlement went up from 35% to 47%. In other words, it increased by about a third in a 12 year period.Jonathan VanHorn:What do you think led to the increase? Do you think it was-David Harris:More people stealing.Jonathan VanHorn:Okay, well that... People don't all of a sudden wake up and there's like a third more thieves than there was before. I do think it was like the financial crisis of 2008, the economic downturn. Do you see that more often in years where like... We're in boom economies right now, technically. Do you see fraud more prevalent in downturns versus... I mean you've been doing it long enough. Do you see a rhyme or reason to that? Or you just see it all the time, one way or the other?David Harris:There are probably a lot of reasons. First of all, I think that we've done a fair job of shouting from the rooftops and increasing awareness. So I think a higher percentage of the thieves are being caught now. And probably that unquantifiable group who I mentioned who steal and don't caught is getting a little bit smaller. And then yeah, you can point to a lot of events that prompt people to steal. And the other thing Jonathan, I think is that the financial operations of a dental practice are getting more complicated than they once were. Dentists if we're going to be really blunt about it, the control systems in most practices haven't changed fundamentally since the 1960's, which was before computerization, before practices took credit cards, before there was such a thing as an electronic funds transfer, and when probably most dental practices were managed by the doctor's spouse, as opposed to an arm's length employee. Okay. So all those changes that have happened since, I don't know, 1965 and yet the control systems fundamentally haven't changed.Jonathan VanHorn:Do you feel like the technology getting more... I don't know if automated is the right word, but being more efficient has helped or hurt dentists chances of being embezzled against?David Harris:Every technological change creates opportunities for thieves. One of the most successful thieves of the 20th century was a guy named Frank Abigail. And if you've seen or heard about the movie, Catch Me If You Can. That's his story. And Frank was predominantly a guy who passed worthless checks and monetized them. And he said a couple of years ago, if I were doing this today instead of in the sixties and seventies, the amount of money I could have stolen would have been much, much, much higher.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah.David Harris:And I don't think he's commenting on the effect of inflation on dollars over time. He's simply saying I could do a lot more of this today. And the same comment applies to dentistry. Every innovation and one innovation I'll point to that opened some doors for thieves is a thing called a Square. And a Square is a little white plastic gizmo that plugs into the bottom of a smartphone and allows somebody to pay by credit card. I'm not going to map out the opportunities it creates, but I'll just point to that device and say if I were a thief, I would have a Square.Jonathan VanHorn:So I just gave an example that was too specific for David that happened in a real world situation. So we're not going to share that in case anyone who's listening and looking for opportunities. So we talked about the financial impact and the risk associated with doing this right or that dentists just implicitly take on by being a business owner today's environment in the dental world. A question that I've gotten in the past and whenever I get questions like this I always say in my experience... But I don't have much experience in this world so I'm just going to tell you as friendly information, just as anecdotal information, does fraud or embezzlement typically happen in smaller offices like three to seven employees, or does it typically happen in larger offices of like 20 to 30 plus employees? Again, another question of, do you have any data on this or just thoughts?David Harris:All kinds. What drives the probability of fraud or in this case embezzlement is really the probability of you hiring a dishonest person. And that has no relationship whatsoever to office size or whether you're a periodontist versus a prosthodontist or anything like that at all. The real probability we're dealing with is it somebody you hire maybe 20 years ago woke up this morning and said, "Yeah, today's the day I'm going to steal from my doctor." Statistically, Jonathan, this is a complete random walk. It doesn't depend on any factors relating to the doctor. I mean, another one that I will hear a lot from doctors is "Well, I pay my staff really well and therefore I'm purchasing their honesty and lessening the chance that they will steal from me." Okay. Well, let's go back to those ego-driven thieves.David Harris:The greedy ones that I talked about. These people are like bottomless pits. They overestimate their value by a multiple. In other words, they think you should be paying them three or five times what you are. That extra $2 that you pay your staff above kind of the local going rate, doesn't come close to scratching that edge. So no, there are no offices that are more or less vulnerable. People say my staff have been with me forever and therefore I'm not vulnerable, or I pay people really well or I live in a small town where all of the people I hire used to be my patients. And we see embezzlement that fits all of those profiles.Joseph Rugger:Let me ask you this, David. So when we talk about money in and money out, this is something that you referred to as the revenue side on the expense side. So whenever you're looking at all of the different embezzlements, what typically do you see? Is it majority revenue side stuff or is it majority expense side? And if you could maybe just kind of expand upon that, just for folks that aren't super savvy with accounting terms like revenue [crosstalk 00:20:17]-David Harris:Absolutely. And for the benefit of the non-accountants in the audience, what Joseph's asking about really is there are two ways that people could conceivably steal and he's wondering which of them is dominant. So by revenue side stealing, we mean somebody taking payments that come into the practice from either patients or insurance companies. And expense side stealing would be things like tampering with payroll or if the practice has a bonus plan trying to do things that will maximize the bonus. Or something we've been seeing a lot of lately is staff members making personal purchases because the practice has an Amazon account. So that's expense side stealing. Revenue side means patient or insurance payments. What we see Joseph is probably 80% revenue side theft and 20% expense side theft. So revenue is by far and away the dominant thing.David Harris:And if I'm the office manager and I want to steal on the expense side, it takes work. I have to do things to make that happen. And while I'm doing those things, people are putting $20 bills on my desk. So the temptation is much stronger on the revenue side. The other issue is this, let's say that I steal by inflating how much I get paid. There's a real limit to what I can do there, because at some point there's salary expense relative to revenue is going to climb to something that's extreme. And people like my CPA firm will say to the doctor, "Well, why is your expense ratio so high? Did you give all your staff a huge raise or something?" So it becomes conspicuous. Statistically, on the other hand, I can steal the same amount of money on the revenue side and it won't move any of the major key performance indicators enough to be conspicuous.David Harris:So if I'm a little bit analytical about it, I'm going to say I could easily take 5% of practice revenue without waving any particular red flags. On the other hand, if I took 5% of revenue in the form of salary it's certainly going to be noticed.Joseph Rugger:Had a practice owner the other day, brand new practice owner, he said, "Well, I feel like I'm doing a good thing here from a controls perspective. And we've gone cashless at our office, so we don't receive cash so that kind of inundates me from this revenue side." What would be maybe some of your thoughts on that? Certainly brand new practice owner, super great dentist, successful, does well but that was kind of one of his I'm preventing embezzlement because I'm not accepting cash at the window.David Harris:Yeah. First of all, I agree with his decision not to accept cash. It's a nuisance to handle it. It poses a lot of accounting challenges for practices. When they do things like take cash that came in and use it to pay off as expenses. I mean, you guys have both probably tried to work through the little accounting tornado that that can create. So I love the idea of being cashless. If I were an embezzler, would that stop me in my tracks, not a chance. It is much easier than most dentists realize to cash a check payable to them. And it is also not that hard to monetize a credit card payment, or even what's an ACH deposit. And for the benefit of the audience, ACH means automated clearinghouse. So that's when somebody like an insurance company, for example, deposits money directly into your bank account. As long as the thief is a little bit motivated and they normally are they will always find a way to monetize incoming money.David Harris:Again, I don't think we should take this out of context, Joseph. I think what your friend did was a good idea. However, it won't stop an embezzler. It will simply challenge channel them into some other way of stealing.Joseph Rugger:Whenever you look at the stuff that you've done and investigated, I'm sure that you guys come back and have a number of recommendations that you have. So to the extent that you feel comfortable sharing, what are maybe just some common steps that a practice owner might take to... I mean, I feel like you're not ever going to eliminate completely the embezzlement risk, right. You're going to do everything that you can to mitigate it. What are maybe some practical takeaways that they might be able to do to just help start to minimize that risk or minimize that opportunity?David Harris:Absolutely. Well, let's go right back to the very beginning to when dinosaurs roamed the earth. And the first thing I'll say about dentists is that they categorically hate the hiring process. And like any job you hate, mine is cleaning the garage, when a shortcut appears you tend to grab it. And a lot of dentists will take shortcuts in hiring. Shortcuts will include things like not calling former employers, not doing a criminal records check. It astounds me the low percentage of dentists who drug test applicants. I mean, I can't get a job at FedEx delivering the crap people buy on Amazon without a drug test. And yet I can work in a dental practice that can prescribe narcotics. That makes absolutely no sense. So the first thing is that dentists hire people knowing far less about them than they should and that's really easily correctable. So let's start there. We've got to do a better job of screening people before we hire them. I'll give you a sobering statistic. 70 million Americans so that is one in four adults has a criminal record.David Harris:And yet the majority of practices don't check criminal records before they hire. It's easy to do and they just don't. I wouldn't hire somebody today without looking a little bit at their social media activity, because you can learn a lot about people by the way they conduct themselves on Facebook or Instagram or whatever.Jonathan VanHorn:As a person who has a team of 16 people, I have gone through the hiring process many times I can tell you, yes, you can find out a lot with just a little bit of social media digging.David Harris:Yeah. It's even more basic than that, Jonathan. When I'm interviewing somebody face to face, one of the things I should say is I just need to check your eye identification so can you please show me your government issued photo ID and a couple of secondary pieces of identification. And the secondary stuff could be anything. I mean, a gym membership, a library card, a credit card, whatever, but I want to see one with a photo and two others with your name. Because if I have baggage and I'm applying for a job with you, one of the easiest ways to hide that baggage is to pretend to be somebody else like my brother.Jonathan VanHorn:That's a really good point. Yeah. That would be pretty simple to do. Just go by a different name everyday.David Harris:It's so simple. So Joseph, to answer your question, the first piece is hiring. The second piece is this and it's really simple. Your practice management software, every single day, will produce a report at the end of the day that says here's how much money you collected. And that should be the amount that gets deposited into your bank. There are two kinds of dentists. There are those who know how much money should go in the bank today and check their online banking to see if it happened and there are those who don't. The majority are in the second category. Again, I think this is probably 20% of doctors know how much the deposit should be and check it and 80% just kind of blindly hope that the amount of money that goes in is right. If you're in that 80%, you make it really easy for me to steal from you because I can simply partition the deposit into the part that I'm going to put it in your bank and the part I'm going to put it in mine.David Harris:If you check this, I can still steal from you, but now it gets a little tougher because what I have to do is I have to teach your practice management software how to lie to you about how much money came in. It's far from impossible. In fact, it's relatively easy in most software, but if you check one against the other immediately, you have ruled out the bottom core tile of thieves, right. The laziest, the least imaginative can't steal from you anymore. Okay. So if you don't check deposit against what goes in the bank, then the laziest, dumbest thief on the planet can successfully steal from you. Okay. So let's start there. It's easy in theory, the practice is a little more complicated because some of the money that comes into a practice arrives at a different time than when it's recognized by the practice management software.David Harris:So for example, if I go to your practice and I pay by credit card your practice management software records it today, but there's a processing lag of typically a couple of days before that same money hits your practice bank account. So it's a little bit challenging for a doctor. And it's one of the things often that I suggest they outsource to somebody, but if you're not doing that, as I say, you're vulnerable to very unimaginative stealing.Jonathan VanHorn:This is one of those areas that as CPA's, we run into a lot because we get a lot of on this. And one big misconception that we want to make sure is very clear in this episode is your CPA's job is not to help you with fraud. Your CPA's job is to create a reconciliation of your accounting if they're doing your bookkeeping and create financial statements. If you read any reports that come with financial statements being issued and any engagement letters, it's going to stay in there that we cannot catch fraud by doing those steps. That's not what we're doing. We're technically by compiling that information we're just technically putting on a piece of paper what your practice has told us has happened.Jonathan VanHorn:And so very often get people that speak to me and said, "Okay, so you're my CPA, and you're going to protect me against fraud." And you have to very quickly say, "No, that's not what the CPA does." I mean, the highest level engagement that a CPA typically in a public accounting firm does for small businesses is usually an audit. And in an audit you typically say an audit is not designed to catch fraud. It's supposed to help you determine how your internal controls are working. It's not there to catch fraud. And if there's fraud occurring, we may not even catch it if we do an audit, which is the highest level engagement that an attest service can be done for a public CPA firm. That is not engaging in something like forensic accounting or something along those lines. Right. And so-David Harris:Even there the majority of dental practices don't get an audit. They get a lower level of engagement with the accountants.Jonathan VanHorn:Exactly.David Harris:The chance of finding embezzlement goes down even more. Let's lay out the problem though, maybe in a little different way. Jonathan, let's say, I go to you as my CPA. And I say, "Jonathan, I'm so excited. I'm going to start a business." And you say, "That's great, David, how are you going to keep the books for your business?" And I say to you, "Jonathan, I've got this great idea. I'm going to have one piece of software track my revenue, and I'm going to have a totally different piece of software look after expenses. And Jonathan, here's the best part. These two aren't even going to talk to each other." You would say to me, "David, that's the stupidest idea I ever heard. I mean, there's no way that would work."Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah.David Harris:And yet that is every dental practice.Jonathan VanHorn:It drives me crazy that the practice management softwares do that. Open Dental talks to QuickBooks online, but it's such a shoddy like API grab thing. It doesn't really do anything.David Harris:Yeah.Jonathan VanHorn:So, yeah. It's frustrating.David Harris:But most businesses use a one piece of software that tracks both the revenue and the expenses and dentistry is different. It's a goofy, complicated system. And when accountants do their work... To do what they're mandated to do, which is as you say, produce financial statements and ultimately information for the IRS, they really don't even need to look at the practice management software to do that at all. I mean the other side, the expense side, is really all you need plus the bank statements. So most accountants don't even look at practice management software. And as you point out, they're not really paid to. And even if they were, then we get into the question of whether they have the expertise to make much sense of what's happening in that software. So the accounting processes is kind of an uncommon one for dentists.David Harris:And it really means that the chance of the CPA's finding the embezzlement is very low. And I'll give you some statistics on this. When we look at how embezzlement is found across all industries. So dentistry plus everything else, accountants find about 40%. When we narrow the focus to just dentistry, that number goes down to about 8%. And it's not because the accountants who deal with dentists are dumber than all the other accountants. I mean, that very clearly is not the case. In fact, I think you could argue the opposite. You guys aren't in a position to contest this point of mine, but it's that the accounting system in this divided fashion just really does not lend itself to somebody following the accounting process, identifying embezzlement.Jonathan VanHorn:Absolutely. Well, I tell doctors all the time, "Look we're not in your office every day. When you do that into the day close, we're not there with you. We can not tell you if that day sheet is correct or not. We will never know if that day she has deletions or adjustments or what they were for or why they were done." All that we can do is if you put a deposit into the accounting system or your office manager does, or whomever does, we can then tell you if it hit the bank account, that's all we can do. But we can't tell you if that piece of paper was right or not.David Harris:That's right. And to go back to Joseph's question about what a doctor can do, that's my next point. That day end report that your software produces needs to be something that you scrutinize. If you simply stick that in a drawer somewhere and don't look at it, then you're vulnerable to the other type of manipulation that somebody does. And as I say, if we're stealing on the revenue side, if you don't look at the deposit, I just partition the deposit. If you do look at the deposit, now I have to make practice management software misrepresent how much money you make. And the way I do that is I make deceptive entries in your software. So you need to look at that day end report and you also need to compare all of the day end reports that you have to a month end report printed on the same basis. In other words, if I have 20 reports from my business days in the practice, and they don't add up to the month end report, then something happened on a Saturday.Jonathan VanHorn:That's a great point. Yeah. And just to hammer this point in, this is from another consultant that was in the practice management world. They said one thing that happens that's really common on day sheets is that stuff doesn't get billed that was done during the day. And it's not because someone is stealing from you it's because they just forgot to put it on there. And so you should be doing this just from a revenue standpoint, one way or the other. Like there's no reason to not be doing this in other words. There's multiple reasons other than just than this to have that be a part of your business practice.David Harris:Early in my career, Jonathan, I was hired by a dentist who was convinced that his staff are stealing from him. And the basis really was that he just didn't see the amount of revenue that his level of activity would suggest. And I started digging in a little bit and what I saw was that the hygienists in the practice were not actually billing any x-rays. And I asked the doctor, "Well, is all the radiography done by your assistant and your own operatory?" And he said, "No, my hygienists do the films." What came out of this was a really stupid thing. Now this was back in the days of when x-rays were taken on film, not digital, the hygienists would take the x-rays and she would put them in the chart. She would give the chart to the front desk.David Harris:And her expectation was that the front desk would see the x-rays there bill a code. And the front desk people are saying, "I see an x-ray in there, but I don't know if it was taken today or last millennium. If you did something hygienist write it on the chart and then I'll bill it." So it was just a little communication thing, but it was costing the doctor about $80,000 a year.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah.David Harris:And when I told him what the problem was, I said, "Okay, that's the kind of symptom. The real problem is you're not looking at the day end reports because if you did, you would notice that there's no possible way that a hygienist could see 12 patients today with no radiography." So your point is spot on, that this is your chance to miss or to spot where somebody made a clerical error and it could cost you $300 as well as looking for the stuff that is, as I say, deceptive kind of entries. So we need to look at day ends. Doctors think that month end is something the staff do that they don't really understand. And the final point Joseph is that if I'm a dentist and I own a practice, the reports that I review should be ones that I printed myself. As soon as I allow a staff member to print a report and hand it to me, I have no control over the assumptions used to generate that report. And if a staff member wants to hide stuff from me, that's a huge enabler.Jonathan VanHorn:So we get this question all the time. And it's one that I struggle with is I'm a new doctor, I don't even know what practice management software we use. How do I figure out how to print the reports out? It dumbfounds me that people don't get training... There's no training in this like dental school or something like that.David Harris:Well let's be honest. Nobody became a dentist because they had this burning desire to be a business owner. It's the nasty trick, Jonathan, that they spring on them in fourth year dental school when they say to them, "Oh, and by the way, you also have to run the place." And at that point, they owe $380,000 in student loans and it's just way too late to turn around and paint houses for a living. For every dentist I've ever met, the running of the practice is kind of the unwanted stepchild in the marriage. But let's call a spade, a spade here. Practice management software is not going to go away. It's going to be with you if you're a dentist for the rest of your career. And it is more important to your financial wellbeing than your hand pieces.David Harris:And yet they all know the hand piece, like it's their child, but when they get to practice management software it's like, "I don't want to touch it because I might break it." You started your sentence to me by saying, "When a dentist..." The one thing we know about dentists is that they can all learn to get into and then out of dental school, they had to do a lot of that. So the question is, where do you get the information? Every software company has trainers whether it's Eaglesoft or Dentrix or Orthotrac. They all have this whole army of trainers who would love to sit with a doctor for a couple of hours and say, "Okay, doctor, here are the reports that are going to be most valuable to you. And here's how you actually print them in your software."Jonathan VanHorn:And they're usually paying for that already, too with their monthly fee or whatever their fee is right?David Harris:Whether they are or they aren't, if you had to buy a couple of hours of a software trainer's time and it costs you $300, like the return on that investment is phenomenal.Jonathan VanHorn:True. So we've covered some really cool stuff today. David, is there anything else that you feel like needs to be covered in the realm of this conversation? There's probably dozens of hours worth of information we could probably be discussing right now, but in terms of what we talked about so far, is there anything that we missed or that we glossed over that you think needs to be reemphasized?David Harris:Dentists in general, aren't natural skeptics. As I said before, there are people who deal in a physical scientific world and they're used to linear problems with linear solutions. And it just doesn't come naturally to them when they're talking to somebody to ask themselves, what if this person has a hidden agenda. And when you think about how dentists relate to each other in a clinical sense, I mean, a general dentist sends a patient to an orthodontist for assessment and the orthodontist writes the general dentist back and says, "Yeah, I think this patient would benefit from treatment." There's an altruism involved. I mean, the general dentist is a hundred percent entitled to believe that the orthodontist is doing that because it's in the patient's best interest, not because the orthodontist is trying to buy a boat. That's the code that they have. And it serves them really well inside the clinical bubble and horribly outside of it. And when you're hiring somebody, which again, most dentists find a stressful and challenging process to step back a little bit when you're interviewing somebody and saying, "Well, what if, what they're telling me isn't completely true", is challenging.David Harris:But I've given this statistics, I've given the sad news that most of your clients sooner or later will be victims. And the biggest thing that you can do to prevent that is to be a little bit skeptical.Jonathan VanHorn:That's right. So if we have some people that are listening right now that are currently skeptical, how can they find you? What can they do to hear more about this topic or read more of your stuff or even connect with you or your company?David Harris:Absolutely. And I should start by saying, we provide really two distinct services. One thing that we do is when a dentist is suspicious or they've caught somebody, or the thought of somebody stealing their money just keeps them up at night we can do stealthy investigations. So staff don't even know that we're on the job. We can see if stealing is happening. And if it is help the doctor deal with the fallout that comes from that. The other thing that we do Jonathan, is that we work with dentists to help lower their risk. So we will teach them how to generate the reports they need and what to look for on those reports. And we even will look at things like hiring and security settings in their practice management software. So we will help somebody set up their control system so they're as protective as they can be. Those are the two things we do.David Harris:If somebody wants to reach us, they can call our toll free number, which is 888-398-2327 or they can reach us on our website. And once they hear it, they'll never forget it, www.dentalembezzlement.com.Jonathan VanHorn:Fantastic. Well, as always, it's a pleasure getting to reconnect to my friend. I urge anyone that is more interested in this topic it's absolutely fascinating... If you follow David on Facebook, he's put up posts about all these people that have been caught. It's really interesting to be a part of and to see a little bit of a glimpse into David's world. And I urge you to reach out to David. He's a fantastic resource to the dental community at large, and he helps put people that want to take advantage of the people that we care a lot about, which is are you guys the dentist behind bars and hold them accountable and take care of those things inside of this industry. So, David, thank you for what you do for the industry and everyone listening. I hope you have a great time, a great day, and we will see you on the next episode.Jonathan VanHorn:That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth and Coin podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CPA services head on over to toothandcoin.com. You can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country. I'd love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners so people that have are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up, or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty. And we'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services.Jonathan VanHorn:And if you enjoy today's episode again, go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm. Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word toothandcoin to 33444. That's toothandcoin, no spaces, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Reply with your email address. We'll send you instructions on the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available and we will see you next week.

Join your Prosperident hosts David Harris, Wendy Askins and Amber Weber as they welcome special guest Gary Salman, CEO of Black Talon Security. Gary gives an eye-opening presentation on two topics that present significant danger to dental practices, cybersecurity and ransomware. 

Prosperident's Amber Weber, David Harris and Wendy Askins set aside their embezzlement knowledge to focus on non-employee threats to a practice.  Topics covered include burglary, medication scams and identity theft.

David is the Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. In this informative podcast, he discusses what may be the coolest job in dentistry—chasing and catching  those who steal from dentists. A rule-breaker in his youth, David changed his direction and has spent much of his adult life in the world of investigation and enforcement, where he uses his unrivaled ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dentists. David is a licensed private investigator, a Forensic Certified Public Accountant, and a Certified Fraud Examiner. He is the author of the book Dental Embezzlement: The Art of Theft and the Science of Control and over 30 articles in dental publications. In addition to being a prolific author, David is a frequent presenter at regional, national, and international dental conferences, and his vast wealth of experience, coupled with his keen sense of humor, make David both an engaging and entertaining speaker. The Dental Clinical Companion Podcast (DCCP) is provided for general informational purposes only. The DCCP, MounceEndo, LLC, Dr. Joel Fransen, Richmond Endodontics CA, and Dr. Richard Mounce personally have no liability for any clinical, management, or financial decisions or actions taken or made by you based on the information provided in this program. The DCCP is not intended to offer dental, medical, legal, management, investment, surgical, tax, clinical, or any other professional advice. Reliance on the information in the DCCP is done entirely at the listeners own risk.  No guarantees, representations, or warrantees are made with regard to the completeness, accuracy, and/or quality of the DCCP.  The DCCP takes no responsibility for, does not endorse, and does not imply a relationship/affiliation to any websites, products, services, devices, individuals, organizations which are hyperlinked to any DCCP component or mentioned in the DCCP. Third party materials, hyperlinks, and/or DCCP content does not reflect the opinions, standards, and policies of MounceEndo, LLC (owner of the DCCP, Dr. Richard Mounce, the guest, or show sponsors). The DCCP makes no warranty that the Podcast and its server are free of computer viruses or other destructive or contaminating code elements. The Dental Clinical Companion Podcast expressly disclaims any and all liability or responsibility for any direct, indirect, incidental, special consequential or other damages arising out of any individuals use of, reference to, reliance on, or inability to use, this podcast or the information presented in this podcast. Support the show (http://mounceendo.com/)

Prosperident team members David Harris, Wendy Askins, and Amber Weber are interviewed by Ken Kaufman of Community Dental Partners about the embezzlement issues that are specific to  Dental Support Organizations.This podcast is an episode of the DSO Secrets podcast, which is shared through the DSO Secrets Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/DSOSecrets

In this episode, Prosperident's David Harris, Wendy Askins and Amber Weber discuss strategies a dentist can employ to avoid becoming an embezzlement victim.

Join the discussion on Facebook!Full Transcript:Jonathan:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin podcast where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones, some of them are very specific but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey.Jonathan:Now a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advise. This is not paid task or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors, we are not your CPA's, this is two CPA's talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand. Another thing that you need to know is that if you enjoyed today's content, join us on the Facebook group. We've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share, join us on the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there.Jonathan:Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering around our topics of discussion to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. If you'd like access to that whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word Tooth and Coin, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Again, that's Tooth and Coin, all one word, no spaces to 33444, reply with your email address and we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group as well as add you to the list to be able to send you those resources when they're available. If they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well.Jonathan:Onto today's episode, hope you enjoy it. Hey there ambitious dentists, today on the Tooth and Coin podcast we're going to be talking about the number one most exciting thing in dentistry which is fraud. Everyone's afraid of it, everyone hates it, everyone hears this happening and thinks that it may happen to them. I've seen numbers from really smart people say that something like one out of every three, to one out of every two dentists will at some point in their career, be embezzled upon. It's a staggeringly high number of dentists may actually be effected by this in their practice. I get a lot of questions and a lot of confusion about, "Why does this happen? How does it happen? Is a CPA firm going to help me with this problem in my life?" And things like that.Jonathan:The answer is not... it's a nuanced answer like so many things are, it's not a one size fits all. Today's discussion we're going to be talking about the problem that is embezzlement in dental practices and I've already kind of highlighted what the problem is, people they can steal your money. To highlight that problem I'm going to be asking Joseph, Joseph has actually lectured on this topic before and then we're going to turn the tables around and Joseph's going to talk to me about in terms of the CPA firm helps with this problem inside of our clients and what our perspective is and how we view our service for our clients when it comes to this really nasty thing inside of not just dental practices, but all small businesses.Jonathan:Again, the main problem is that a lot of people are going to be embezzled upon, dental practices for some reason tend to be targeted a lot for embezzlement. Joseph, why don't you tell us why does fraud occur in small business, especially to dentists.Joseph:That number that you just spit out, that's nuts. I don't know that I've heard that. Somewhere between 30 to 50% of dentists get embezzled upon during their career. I guess if you look at the average dentist, we're talking about 30 plus years, we're talking most of them are going to own their own shop or at least the ones that are listening to our podcast are going to own their own shop at some point. I guess when you put it out that long, I guess that increases the odds. The Small Business Administration talks about the percentage of businesses that fail. Maybe dentists are so high because they're such a great business to be in and they've got such longevity with them, I don't know.Joseph:Man, that's a crazy stat for sure.Jonathan:It really is. I think the reason that is is because there's a lot of different forms of embezzlement, there's literally someone stealing tons and tons of money, and then there's people that are stealing supplies. Embezzlement has... or stealing hours even, just putting too many hours down compared to what they worked for. You may be one of those 50% but it may be that somebody padded hours for three months before you fired them. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're getting hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen.Jonathan:Yeah, it's a big number and something you've got to be aware of. You've got to be on top of.Joseph:That'll wake you up in the morning. If you're listening to our podcast bright early in the morning, that should wake you up and get your attention.Jonathan:Oh yeah.Joseph:Jonathon, as CPA's we are specifically trained to think a certain way and you may think that this is right, you may think that this is wrong, but one of the things that they've just kind of ingrained in our brain is that everyone's going to steal from you given the right set of circumstances. That's kind of the way we're trained to think is, "How do we think about it in terms of those specific pieces?" Kind of the tried and true piece that we always point to in the CPA world is what's referred to as the fraud triangle. Do you remember the fraud triangle? Have you talked about the fraud triangle since you took the CPA exam?Joseph:Did you wake up in the morning, you're like, "Hey April, what's going on babe? Let's talk about the fraud triangle."Jonathan:The triangle that I usually refer to is the cheat, fast and quality, is that triangle. I don't usually talk about this triangle, the fraud triangle. Talk to me about the fraud triangle.Joseph:There's three sides to the fraud triangle, right? That's why we use a triangle, three sides. We've got three different pieces to fraud. The first part of the fraud triangle, and it doesn't really go in any specific order, but one of them is incentive. "Do I have an incentive to commit fraud?" I'm going to use your example. If I go and I pad my hours, in other words if I go out and I say, "I didn't work eight hours today, I worked eight and a half," but I actually only worked like seven in a half. That's padding my hours and I'm going to have a direct incentive from that.Joseph:Kind of the higher levels of financial management there is the incentive that if our PNL numbers look better, I'm going to get a higher bonus. If my overhead percentage stays under a point, then I'm going to get some sort of financial incentive. Incentive's the first piece of the fraud triangle, anything else that you might think of in the dental world that would be part of an incentive for fraud? Do we have any... I would imagine some of them. Go ahead.Jonathan:Yeah, there are tons of incentives for fraud in this world. There's tons of incentives for people to... really the main incentive that people have inside the dental world is usually just money. That's the incentive for people to try and take it. They want more money. Whether it's money that they deserve or not, that's what they are typically wanting.Joseph:Got it. Maybe you have a new patient bonus to where if you have X amount of new patients that are out there, and if you get those new patients numbers, that may be the incentive that somebody goes and then creates a new patient inside of the software, or something silly like that. Incentives the first piece of the fraud triangle.Joseph:The second piece of the fraud triangle is opportunity. Opportunity is probably the one that is easiest to understand so if I am working the front desk and somebody pays in cash and they give me $80 worth of cash. I have the opportunity to stick that cash right inside my pocket. I was just looking at some financials for one of our clients that has multiple employees that have the corporate credit card. If you're walking around with the corporate credit card in your wallet as an employee or team member of a dental practice, then you are presented every single day with the opportunity to whip that card out at wherever you want to and do that. Opportunity's the second piece.Joseph:The third piece that is I think the more psychological piece that's out there, is what's called rational. The rational basically is a way for our mind to justify that what I'm doing is okay. It may go something like this, "Well Mr and Mrs dentist is just doing so well, they're making all this money. I see all of these deposits come through. They pay me a pittance, I'm making minimum wage or not nearly enough." I've just rationalized in my head that it's okay to take money, to pad hours, to swipe the corporate credit card, to take any form of all these different pieces that are out there.Joseph:That's the three pieces of the fraud triangle that we were trained upon way back when inside of CPA land. Opportunity, incentive and then rational. What one kind of sticks out for you Jonathon?Jonathan:It's almost always opportunity to me is what it seems like to me in terms of why this happens. When it happens in this industry, I guess is a better way for me to say it. Usually it seems to be opportunity. Someone perceives a weakness in, this is CPA talk, internal controls which for everyone that's listening, internal controls are effectively like, "Hey, nobody's looking over my shoulder when I'm doing this, and I can just take that money if I want to. If you've ever seen Office Space, it's whenever they do the thing, they have this computer program that rounds it to the next penny and they're like, "No ones looking at this. All we have to do is round this fraction of a penny up and then put it into a different bank account and literally no one will ever figure it out because it's literally we're talking about hundreds of thousands of transactions. We're talking about a hundredth of a penny per transaction. That transaction will never be looked at or flagged so that money will just be in this bank account."Jonathan:It's opportunity is what typically happens in dental practices, is they think that, "Hey, I'm the only one who writes the checks. I'm the one who receives the inventory. I'm the one who pays the bill. I'm the one who signs the check. I'm the one who receives the patients money. I'm the one who enters it into the practice management software. I'm the one who takes it to the bank." There's no one really looking over their shoulder. Opportunity, usually to me I think is the first path towards... into the dental space of it, is they realize, "Hey, there's a little bit of an opportunity there."Jonathan:I'm fully, fully, fully, fully not going to downplay the fact that there's some type of motivation typically that makes them look for those types of things, but in dental practices, those opportunities seem to arise a lot. I think that's just due to the nature of it being in a smaller business. In your time as a CFO, did you ever have any moments there was the opportunity for fraud at your old place that you could... obviously if it's something that you're not allowed to talk about, don't talk about it but is there anything that you can think of that you've ran into in your career when it comes to fraud?Joseph:I think there are certainly things that as a CFO controller, as a business owner, there are certain steps that you take to try to prevent fraud. One of the things that you were just mentioning there was the same person that's opening the mail is making the deposits and entering stuff into the patient management software. One of the things that we talk about is an accounting term is segregation of duties. You don't want to have the same person that's doing all of those things.Joseph:One of the things that we had to always make sure was that every time a patient came in the door, it was a documented patient encounter that went into the patient management software. What that's going to do is that's going to generate the opportunity to create the coding for that specific encounter. What was the procedure that was done? What was the product that was delivered? Once that whole thing starts, then that really is a good catch about a bunch of different things.Joseph:If somebody came in for a pair of compression hose that were $80, that gets entered into the patient management software, that's then going to give them... they're going to have to pay the $80 because it wasn't covered by insurance. When you think about it in terms of that it's like, okay, if this $80 invoice gets generated, if the patient pays cash and the person that's taking the payment, the front desk person or the clinician or whoever it is, takes that $80 and puts it in their pocket rather than in the company deposit, what's going to happen is because it's in the patient management software, an invoice is going to get generated. Then the patient is going to go ahead and get a bill the next month. If you got a bill for something you already paid for Jonathon, what would be your first thought and what would you do next?Jonathan:If I got a bill for something I already paid for I'd say, "Hey, they've not processed your payment, we need to call the vendor and see what's going on."Joseph:Yeah. Not that that happened regularly, but that was just one specific piece that we had in place. I think the other stuff, I think that probably every CFO's big nightmare or controllers big nightmare is these company credit cards that are out there. Credit card companies make it really, really easy for you once you have a business credit card to order additional card holders and additional probably. I was always real hesitant to have somebody get added to the company credit card because it just creates this opportunity and if you take the opportunity and you take the rational, it may be one of those things where somebody's got the corporate credit card and it's time for them to go out to the lake and go fishing this weekend, and they just whip the company credit card out and fill their bass boat up with fuel on the company.Joseph:That's going to look like a charge to Exxon or Shell or Conoco, whoever it is, it's not going to be one of those things. Obviously if you've got somebody that's looking at all that stuff, they say, "Well typically the gas charge is $25, and all the sudden here's an $85 charge on Friday afternoon to Conoco," that may raise a red flag. I think that kind of goes back into the other piece of it is that if you do have a company credit card and you do have people that have those, you need to be reviewing those charges every single month. I don't want you to get carried away and review it daily and think that everybody's stealing from you but you definitely need to give it the old eyeball test.Joseph:Jonathon, I don't know if you're familiar with the formal term of eyeball test, but I was talking to a client about this the other day, I was like, "Man, you need to give it the eyeball test." He's like, "What's that?" I said, "Well, you just kind of take a look at it and see if things look out of whack." What I just mentioned is if typically your gas is $25, $30, $32 and then you have an $85 charge, that doesn't pass the eyeball test. That's something that you need to look into.Joseph:The other thing is that you've got... the IRS requires that you have documentation for every single thing that you're claiming as a business expense. If you've got these credit cards that are out running around, you've got to have some sort of system to collect the receipts and to document that and to say why it was an ordinary necessary business expense. If it comes under scrutiny, that's what the IRS is going to say. I was told by an IRS agent that whenever they presented proof that this was an ordinary necessary business expense, they pulled out the credit card statement and said, "Well, see right here it says Exxon Mobil $24," and they said, "A charge on a credit card statement is not enough documentation to prove that it's an ordinary necessary business expense.Joseph:Those are a couple of things that jump out. Having multiple people having dual controls and segregation of duties, those are big things. Making sure that every patient encounter is entered into your patient management software. One thing I was talking to a client about the other day was one of the things, if I'm sitting back in my CPA brain and I'm trying to invent ways to create fraud, is to review your adjustments report. Let's say, go back to this $80 compression hose, let's say that that patient comes in and they pay $80 and the person that's working the front gets really, really smart and they say, "Oh, we'll just put a patient credit adjust for $80," which means that that patient won't receive a bill and it'll show up as they had actually paid but the cash didn't make it to the company bank account.Joseph:That's something else that's out there. You need to be reviewing your adjustment reports. What would you think on adjustment reports? Is that something that we recommend that they do daily or weekly or monthly? What are your thoughts on those adjustment reports? We made our software so easy to just write balances off, I think somebody with some authority needs to be looking at those. What are your thoughts on that?Jonathan:There's a few. I don't know if it would be called an adjustment in whatever practice management software our clients are using, whether it be [inaudible 00:17:55] or [inaudible 00:17:56] dental, or soften, or whatever it is that they use. They all have the ability to do those types of things. One of the big dangers that a lot of these practice management softwares have 10 ways to do the same thing and really only one of them may be the right way. It will work on the surface but if you were to dig back the reason for doing it in a certain way, usually there's a reason you do it one of those 10 ways for whatever it was you were doing, and a lot of practices use practice management software incorrectly.Jonathan:One of the reasons we typically recommend having an office manager consultant person be able to come in and teach you how to do those the right way so that you are making sure everything goes in their correctly. In terms of the adjustment piece, yeah absolutely. One of the things that I tell people in regards to one of the best ways they can help prevent fraud, is to have a very solid end of day process in their practice. What I tell them is when I was in high school and college, I worked for what doesn't exist anymore, but a video rental store...[crosstalk 00:19:05]Joseph:You're dating yourself there.Jonathan:At the end of every night we had a countdown... yeah. At the end of every night we had to count down the registers which meant that you open the register, you printed out a report from the little software that was done in MS-DOS or some type of shell station. You print out this report, it comes out in that really big wide paper, it said, "This register had this much in cash. This much in checks, and these much in credit card payments go through this register." We had four registers and you had to countdown each register and make sure that every dollar was accounted for that went through that system.Jonathan:Then you had to, if it was cash you had to tie it up or put a rubber band around the cash and you had to put the checks, you had to have a ten key register printed out of that. You had all the credit card receipts, it's done together as well and you had to have it attached to that piece of paper that got printed out from that report and it had to go into the managers box every night.Jonathan:That was the first time I ever encountered something like this where you'd have two managers and they'd enter in an adjustment in a different way. Eventually one of those managers got in trouble because they weren't doing it the way that it needed to be done in order for the register at the end of the night to be accurately counting everything whenever it did the month end. It was one of those things where it worked for the day, but eventually it messed something up in the calculations down the road that that person didn't see until the manager was trying to do the month end closes and things like that.Jonathan:I tell people, one of the best things you can have in your small practice, because let's face it, a lot of people can't do segregation of duties. There's two people working in the front office and one of those might be the dentist in some of our practices. There's not much that they can do so what they do is it all gets housed under one persons hat. End of day process is really important and one of the things we tell the dentist they need to do everyday, or that we've heard from practice management consultants that are office people, have said that, "Have the dentist look at their day report everyday. Their day sheet and look at literally everything that came through the practice just to make sure that it makes sense."Jonathan:One of the things they said is to make sure that there's no adjustments to any patient accounts. There shouldn't be adjustments or deletions from patient accounts because if they're doing that then they've likely done something incorrectly. The way that it was explained to me, and again it depends on how your practice management softwares set up or whatever it is, is that there should be credits to accounts or there should be charges to accounts and then there should be write offs to accounts. There really shouldn't be adjustments to services after they've already been done unless there's a very valid reason. For example, "We accidentally billed this person for porcelain crown when it was a gold crown, so we had to take the porcelain crown off and add the gold crown charge in."Jonathan:There has to be a very specific reason, there should be an indication by each of those things done in that day sheet that you get that is a part of this. This is one of the things I also heard that you do whenever you're in a larger practice as well, if you're an associate for a larger practice you should be looking at your day sheet to make sure that you got credit for everything that you did that day. You didn't get put to the wrong provider, or you didn't... if you did something it actually got put onto the fee schedule so you actually got paid for it, so that the charge went to the patient account.Jonathan:That's something that I was told needs to be done on a daily basis as a part of that day end close process. That's one thing is the day sheet. The other thing is from the end of the day close, you should have what I mentioned for the video store rental place, you should have something from the practice management software saying, "We had this much in cash come in today, we had this much in checks come in today, we had this much in credit cards come in today." That should be tied together and there should be source documents there. There should be things showing you that those numbers are actually what happened.Jonathan:It gets a little bit complex in dental because you have all these insurance payments come in through electronic transactions. We get a letter in saying, "Hey, we're going to deposit this money into your account on the 24th of the month," and then it does get deposited on the 24th but it doesn't hit your bank account until the 25th. It's kind of hard to see how that happens because you enter it, you get that letter in a week in advance so the person in the front might be entering that notice into the system the week of when they get the letter, rather than the day it went into the account or even the day that it registered in the account.Jonathan:There's some complexities that can happen right there. Another really, really good reason to have a really good office manager type consultant, a person that we recommend a lot is Sandy Pardue, she's out of Louisiana. She's really, really great. There's also other programs out there that can help you with this if you're not familiar with how to do this. There are people that can help with this type of process and get this really set up strong for your office. Really important to have that. Really important to have that. That is not something that our office does. We are not practice management consultants.Jonathan:If you tell us what is happening in terms of the flow of the accounting dollars and cents that are coming into your office everyday, we can give you just a general understanding if we think that that's... where your areas of risk might be but that's really more of an informal feedback discussion between us than being a part of the service that we get paid for from our role as a CPA.Joseph:Interestingly enough, I'm sure that you get this all the time on sales calls but CPA's, we generally don't catch fraud. It's not something that's really a part of what it is that we do. I think the number one way that fraud is caught is by accident and not by something else. What are your thoughts Jonathon? As you get a chance to explain to clients what our role as CPA's is and fraud, what's a message that you're telling them as you kind of get that question, "Oh you guys are going to audit my books and catch fraud, right?" What's your message and what's your thoughts on the CPA's role in fraud?Jonathan:It's a really common misconception and I know that there are people out there that probably propagate that misconception in terms of CPA's that will say, "Oh yeah, we're going to catch that." The AICPA, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants which for the dentists listening, that is like the American Dental Association for you guys. AICPA is the ADA for CPA's basically. The AICPA is very, very specific in how we as CPA's are to view ourselves in terms of audit, or in terms of fraud. That is basically to say that we're not here to catch fraud, that's not really our job. There are people that are CPA's that try to catch fraud, or to even be slightly more specific, they help track down how fraud was occurred after it's been discovered. Those are called forensic accountants.Jonathan:In general, fraudulent activity, there are very few services that CPA's offer that are actually designed to catch fraud. The most in depth service that CPA's offer small business, it's called an audit. There's actually a prescribed engagement called an audit under the AICPA guidelines and that audit even in that, it states in the engagement letter, or in the opinion letter that our services, even if we're doing an audit which is the most in depth thing, they're going to go top to bottom on your internal controls, and your processes and things like that. That audit will even say, "This is not meant to catch fraud." It's really just more to view how strong your internal controls are that could potentially lead to fraud.Jonathan:If they're very weak or if they're very strong, and as well as to give you an overall understanding of how your business operations are running from a business standpoint. That's the purpose of an audit. Even in the most in depth engagement, under the AICPA guidelines, it's still not designed to catch fraud. A CPA that's engaged with you to help with your tax compliance, tax planning, tax rejections, accounting services, management reports, things like that, those services are far, far, far, far less in depth than an audit would be. They are definitely not designed to catch fraud as well.Jonathan:The way that I tell people is that, "Has our firm caught fraud before? Yes, we have." We've seen credit card payments go into vendors that didn't exist. Someone had not in the office, gotten credit card information, was paying for stuff. We've seen... you and I were talking about this before, we had a client just this last weekend had a check that was written from their... this office was in California and the check was cashed in Florida with a different check number, different everything, it just happened to have their routing and account number on it. It's a $20,000 check that got cashed all the way across the country, it was just somebody had fraudulently found their information and put it down and made a fake check, and cashed this check for $20,000.Jonathan:That would be an example of something that our services are not designed to catch a fraud. One of the things that we do, is we ask our clients if we see a transaction that we don't know who the vendor is or who the payee is say, "Hey, what is this $20,000 for?" That would be an example of something that we would... I can't say that we would catch that as being fraud because what could have happened is we could ask the client, "Hey, who is Shelly Franklin and why did you write her a $20,000 check?" If for whatever reason the client had a mental lapse and just never replied to the email or said, "That was for equipment," maybe they paid Henry Shrine $20,000 and they just didn't connect the dots of being two different vendor names, then we would never know. That wouldn't change.Jonathan:That's a big example. $20,000 is a big number amount. What if it had been a $50 check? What if it had been an $80 check or something, a much smaller amount? The way our service is designed, if we don't know who the vendor is and there's no memo, there's nothing in the memo saying what it was for, then even on a smaller item like that we would ask the client who the vendor was and what the purpose was, but I know there's a lot of CPA firms out there that would just be like, "We'll just put that to contract labor. We'll put it to patient refunds," or something like that and just be done with it.Jonathan:Ours is specifically designed to ask that question the way that we do our stuff, but it's not designed to catch fraud, it's designed for us to ask questions about things that we aren't aware of. None of our services are designed to catch fraud, but it doesn't hurt to have somebody that is really familiar with the dental industry to know who the vendors are, to know, "Hey, Align Technology is a lab and A-L-I-G-N-E is not that same company." We need to make sure if a check gets written to A-L-I-G-N-E that we're going to ask, "Who is this person? Who is this vendor?" So you have that second set of eyes just kind of looking over those types of things.Jonathan:We do help. I interviewed multiple years back, and I've had dinner with him, really nice guy David Harris, he owns a company called Prosperident, it's the number one company in probably the world in finding embezzlement inside of dental practices. They help catch hundreds of people a year that have embezzled in dental practices, they're really, really good. He's a CPA, he's a CFE, he's all these things. He has way more letters behind his name then I'd ever care to have. I asked him I was like, "Hey, how can..." this was whenever we were starting the company I was like, "How can we help with this process of combating embezzlement in our practices?"Jonathan:He said, "Jonathon, we help out hundreds of practices a year catch embezzlement or to put these people behind bars if we can, or make them pay. Maybe one percent of the people that we find, the CPA ever even caught a sniffle of what they were doing." He said, "It's just because the services are not designed that way." It's a big misconception out there guys, but I want you to be certain to understand that just because you have a dental CPA does not mean you're fraud proof or you are embezzlement proof. It could mean that you have a little bit of help in someone else kind of keeping an eye on things for you, but at the end of the day, like Joseph had illustrated saying, "Hey, they used the company credit card for gas in the boat rather than gas in the car," if we asked the employee, "Usually it's a $30 gas charge, this time it was a $60 gas charge." And they say, "It was because I usually fill up when I'm at a half tank and this time I filled up... gas was expensive this week." Or, "Yeah, I ended up buying some stuff in the store," or something like that.Jonathan:We're not going to be able to tell if they're lying or not. We weren't' there. We're not going to go and put a dipstick into their gas tank and make sure that they're telling the truth about how much gas they got. You wouldn't want us to do that type of thing either because it would take us so much time you'd be paying us so much money to do that type of work that it would be a negative value consequence to you. It'd be a negative return on your dollars for doing that.Jonathan:To kind of recap that, we try to keep the episodes to 30 minutes length, the problem is a lot of dentists will get embezzlement done in some way. It occurs because of the triangle of fraud which was opportunity... tell me what they were. Opportunity...Joseph:Opportunity's one, incentive is one, like I'm incentivized to create fraudulent transactions, and then rational. "Poor little old me, I don't make enough money. I'm trying to feed my babies, I've got whatever reason, I'm trying to feed my cats. I don't have enough money because this penny pinching dentist doesn't pay me enough money." So the rational. Opportunity, incentive, and rational. The fraud triangle.Jonathan:Yeah, exactly. Those are the things you have to be watching out for. Your CPA can be helpful in this but they're not designed to be the person protecting you bar none from embezzlement. The only person who's going to be able to do that at the end of the day is going to be your internal controls in your practice, and yourself as the business owner. You're going to have to keep an open eye on what's happening. I don't want anybody out there to all the sudden start thinking that the girl in the front is this international person of mystery that's a spy that's going to be stealing all of your money. The way that you have to go about this is you need to have a lot of trust in the people that you hire, or else you hopefully wouldn't have hired them in the first place. You've got to have verification. You've got to have some tests that you'll put into place over time. Make sure that you have a super solid office set up to where you have a solid close. Make sure that you have a way that you're processing your payments to your vendors in a smart way.Jonathan:Don't give the person who's writing the checks a stamp to write your checks with. Don't...[crosstalk 00:34:58]Joseph:Signature stamps.Jonathan:Yeah. Exactly.Joseph:No, don't do that.Jonathan:Don't do that. Make sure that the person who's receiving the inventory is tying those inventories to... or having whatever's coming in also be verified so that you're getting what you're supposed to be getting, you're getting what you paid for. Make sure that your day sheets don't have too many adjustments on them. If they do have adjustments make sure they're totally verified. Make sure that you have a solid deposit set up going. There's a lot of things that you've got to have, make sure they're solid and strong and then the most important thing probably I would say to do at the end of all that is to randomly test those systems.Jonathan:Test them once a quarter will probably be fine, just pick five transactions to randomly test once a quarter, and you will probably be fine. Then outside of that look for weird behaviors from your employees. One of the more common ones that people talk about is there's that office manager that just they do everything, without them the system would fall over. Even the dentist doesn't know what she does. She's always the first one there and she's always the last one to leave, she never takes a vacation. If she does, she's really, really anxious about who's doing what in the office. That's kind of the tell tale sign of someone who has opportunity because they're the only person who knows what's going on. Doesn't mean that they're going to do it, but that is kind of the tell tale sign.Jonathan:Also, look at spending patterns, if you're paying your office manager $40, 50, 60,000 a year, and they always have a new vehicle and maybe they don't have a spouse or something like that, keep your eyes open on that. And keep an eye on your numbers, make sure that your ratios make sense. If they don't sometimes that can lead to it. This has been the episode on fraud, opportunities, how the CPA helps you and the misconceptions surrounding that, and a whole lot of information in the 36 minutes.Jonathan:Joseph, is there anything else that you wanted to state in terms of this topic?Joseph:Don't let your deposits have cash back on them. That's another one. That's a pretty simple step that you can take at the bank, that's one of the things I tell brand new practice owners. If you're not going to be the one taking the deposit to the bank, don't allow it to have cash back. "Oh, $10,000 deposits worth of checks and I get $8,000 back in cash." That's one thing I meant to mention earlier that I didn't. No cash back on deposits, set your accounts up that way.Jonathan:That's a good one. Yeah, that's a good one. Just as a quick story time in this one, I had an attorney call me and he was like, "Hey, we have a client that..." their controller was writing hot checks or something like that, the person that was inside of the business and they were doing something similar to that. They were like, "The CPA didn't catch it. The business owner took them 12 months to figure it out and the person who was doing it was sending the money overseas." The person ended up leaving the country before they realized what had happened.Jonathan:That's a really good example of after doing all the recording and stuff, there's also that step of getting it to the bank. That's definitely a real thing. Anyway, all right guys, we will see you next time on the Tooth and Coin podcast. This has been one about fraud, if you have any stories about fraud or any types of interesting situations that have happened with that, make sure to share it inside of the Facebook group and to share it with the community. We'd love to be able to hear more about it. We will see you guys next time.Joseph:Bye guys.Jonathan:That's it for today guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth and Coin podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com where you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country and we'd love to be able to have the discussion about how we can help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners, so people who are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up, or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty.Jonathan:I would love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services. And if you enjoyed today's episode, again go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the long term.Jonathan:Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word toothandcoin to 33444. That's toothandcoin, no spaces. T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444, reply with your email address, we'll send you instructions to the Facebook group, we'll send you the resources when they're available, and we will see you next week. 

In Episode #93, Insider Dean Steinman talks about dealing with dental embezzlement with David Harris, CEO of Prosperident.In this podcast we cover:- How to spot embezzlement in your practice- How often financial fraud occurs within the dental community- How to protect your practice from future embezzlement issues- and more!

How to Avoid Making the Worst Hiring Mistake of Your Life Episode #305 with David Harris Hiring without due diligence will cost you your time, money, and mental health. To teach you how to make better hiring decisions for your practice, Kirk Behrendt brings back David Harris, CEO of Prosperident. From drug tests to social media, David gives you the best tips to weed out bad candidates early on. Want to know the habits of time thieves and embezzlers? Listen to Episode 305 of The Best Practices Show for more of David's advice! Main Takeaways: Hiring the wrong person is costly — in time and money! Weed out unsuitable candidates as early as possible. Dental practices need to do drug tests and background checks. You can't reliably do background checks yourself! Broaden your applicant pool and don't hire in a hurry. Don't give predictable questions in interviews. Check applicants' social media pages. Don't use phone numbers that applicants give you. Google it yourself. Confirm exact dates of employment, not approximate dates. Look for gaps. Ask former employers about applicants' final positions. Also ask if they would rehire them. Use a reference number in the application to test if they follow instructions. Require applicants to record a brief video as part of the application. Make applicants invested from the beginning. Standardize your application form so that you're not influenced by visuals. Verify credentials and check photo IDs! And check IDs when they're not ready. Involve staff in the interview process. Be upfront about the scrutiny applicants will be under. Quotes: “If you put 200 dentists in a room and you asked them, ‘How many of you enjoy hiring staff?' I'd be very surprised if anything more than two hands went up. Dentists hate this job. And like any job that you hate, when a shortcut magically appears in front of you, you're really tempted to take it. And that gets you into trouble when you're clearing snow off the roof of your house and you take shortcuts, and it equally gets you in trouble when you hire staff.” (05:33—06:06) “The reality is that most dentists make hiring decisions with less information than they should have. And the part that should get their attention is that, in most cases, that information is right there in front of them, and they just either didn't realize that it would help them or didn't realize how easy it was to get full information so that they can make a good decision.” (06:43—07:07) “If you want to play the HR lottery and hire people blindly in the hope that they turn out okay, when you're wrong — and I'm going to say “when” here as opposed to “if” — you're going to dump a lot more time into that than it ever would've taken you to vet this person properly at the beginning.” (08:03—08:26) “About 70 million Americans — so that's one in four adults — has a criminal record.” (08:33—08:39) “We're entrusting dental practice employees with money, with protected health information, with sharp instruments. We just need to know a little bit more about them than traditionally dentists do.” (10:06—10:23) “There is no website you can go on to and pay $50 and have it reliably tell you whether or not somebody has a criminal record . . . Unfortunately, it's not something you can do yourself and go to some website and get the answer.” (12:22—12:59) “One of the mistakes that a lot of people make is that they're hiring in a hurry. The reason that they're hiring in a hurry is that somebody leaves on short notice, and then the poor doctor is starting from zero and trying to build a relationship with somebody that they're going to hire and do it all within 48 hours. And that's never a good idea.” (15:01—15:24) “In your life, when you meet people who you think might be a good fit for your practice — and you can meet them in all kinds of different places — start keeping track of that.” (15:26—15:36) “If we have to choose, and most times we do, between personality and knowledge,...

David Harris may have the coolest job in dentistry - he gets to chase, and catch, those who steal from dentists. A rule-breaker in his youth, David changed his direction and has spent much of his adult life in the world of investigation and enforcement, where he uses his unrivaled ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dentists. David is the Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world’s largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. David is a licensed private investigator, a Forensic Certified Public Accountant, and a Certified Fraud Examiner. He is the author of the book Dental Embezzlement: The Art of Theft and the Science of Control and over 30 articles in dental publications. Join the community on Dentaltown at https://www.dentaltown.com

In this episode, Prosperident's amber Weber and Wendy Askins interview three Prosperident clients and one non-client about their experiences 

Prosperident's David Harris was given the unique opportunity to interview one of dentistry's most prolific embezzlers.  This woman has worked for, and stolen from, over a dozen practices.  With a desire to "set the record straight" she contacted Prosperident and asked to tell her side of the story.  We will leave you to form your own impressions, but it's a fascinating conversation.

In this episode host Ken Kaufman, CFO of Community Dental Partners is joined by dental fraud expert David Harris, to discuss fraud vulnerabilities within the DSO industry. They dive into why DSOs have unique and different fraud vulnerabilities. David Harris is the author of “Dental Embezzlement Expert” and founder and CEO of the world’s oldest and largest dental embezzlement investigation firm, Prosperident (founded 1989). He is a sought-after speaker and foremost expert on all things fraud in the dental space. David’s qualifications include: Certified Fraud Examiner, Certified in Financial Forensics, Forensic CPA, Chartered Professional Accountant, Certified Management Accountant, and Licensed Private Investigator. Whether you’ve been thinking about fraud and how to keep your business safe, or if this is the first time it’s crossed your mind — you don’t want to miss this episode!

Listen to Prosperident's David Harris interview a convicted dental embezzler.  This embezzler, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her name not be used, embezzled more than $250,000 from her doctor and served time in state prison.

Did you know that 80% of all dental practices will be a victim of embezzlement? In this episode, Ericka has a conversation with David Harris the CEO of Prosperident, the worlds largest dental embezzlement firm. David also talks about drug addiction in dentistry and why it is important to screen for drug usage, now more than ever. Be sure to listen to this episode to the very end as David shares his one key take away that ever practice owner and office manager need to understand. If you want to work with David you may contact him by going to his website: www.dentalembezzlement.comBe sure to check out his "Wall of Shame" where you can find the stories of over 680 convicted embezzlers. If you are looking for more billing support join our free Facebook group, Hidden Dental Profit, where we keep the conversations going around everything dental billing! See you in the group my friends!

During your career, someone is likely to defraud you. Here's how to prevent it from happening. Host Ryan Isaac takes the mic on this Dentist Money™ podcast. His guest is David Harris, founder of Prosperident, a forensic investigation firm that specializes in investigating, and protecting dentists from, embezzlement. If you think embezzlement won't happen to you, statistics show it's highly likely to occur during your career. Ryan and David discuss what leads people to embezzle; they profile what a typical embezzler might look like, and they give you warning signs that might tip you off that something is awry. Check out the  Dentist Money™ podcast  at https://dentistadvisors.com/dentist-money-show-podcast/

Prosperident's Wendy Askins, Amber Weber, and David Harris provide in-depth answers to some advance and live questions concerning embezzlement submitted by audience members. If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327.

Join your Prosperident hosts Amber Weber, Wendy Askins, and David Harris along with special guest Dr. Wayne Kerr as they discuss how to address the financial and managerial challenges associated with practice ownership. If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327. 

Listen to Prosperident's David Harris, Amber Weber and Wendy Askins discuss the important steps to take if you suspect embezzlement in your practice. If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327. 

Prosperident's Wendy Askins, Amber Weber and David Harris, along with special guest Kirk Behrendt, CEO of Act Dental (www.actdental.com) discuss the situation currently facing dentistry and how to take advantage of the opportunities currently available to dentists. If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327. 

Listen to Mara Johnson, a bookkeeper specializing in working with dentists, interview Prosperident CEO David Harris.  They discuss the warning signs for embezzlement, and steps a practice owner can take to protect themselves.  Mara's website is https://www.mjbookkeepingtx.com If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327. 

In this episode, hosts Amber Weber and David Harris welcome some of Propserident's investigators to talk about some of their most noteworthy embezzlement cases.  Sonya Hudson, Tony Ulbrandt, Kelly Paxton, Pat Little, and Scott Clifford each discuss an interesting embezzlement matter that they have worked on.  You will get to hear about a dentist's spouse stealing, compulsive gamblers, compulsive spenders and others who earned their way into embezzlement's elite.If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327. 

Prosperident investigates when embezzlement is confirmed or suspected and they assist dentists with implementing systems to protect their practices. Prosperident is the world's oldest and largest firm specializing in the investigation and prevention of embezzlement committed against general dentists and dental specialists Find Prosperident's listing on DealsforDentists.com and get a 10% fee reduction on all services. Enjoy the episode!

Prosperident's David Harris, Wendy Askins, and Amber Weber, along with special guest Penny Reed, discuss tools and strategies to help you find that elusive ideal employee in a sea of mediocrity. If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327.  

Prosperident's Hosts David, Wendy and Amber profile some of the more prolific serial embezzlers that they have encountered and discuss what can be learned from these people. If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327.  

Prosperident's speakers share with you their insights about ending the relationship with an employee. David and Amber share practical advice and answer audience questions on letting employees go.  If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327.  

Prosperident's Amber Weber, Wendy Askins, and David Harris discuss the basic financial safeguards needed by dental practice owners.  The presenters discuss what can be done by staff, what can be outsourced, and what needs to be done personally. If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327.  

Listen to Prosperident team members David Harris, Wendy Askins and Amber Weber discuss how and why embezzlement takes place in dental practices, and offer some strategies practice owners can use to protect themselves.  If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327.  

Many embezzlements that take place in dental practices can be traced back to deficient screening when hiring.  Prosperident's team members discuss how to avoid hiring someone with "baggage" and strategies to ensure that, when hiring a team member, you know what you should about them.If you do have concerns about your practice, or want to protect yourself against embezzlement, please reach us through our website, www.dentalembezzlement.com or call us at 888-398-2327.  

NOTES About 2 million dollars embezzled from one practice   The average that is stolen before they get caught is about $100,000    Be more active in managing the money in your practice    High-achieving dentists have a lot of money and less time to manage that money, which means they are prime targets for stealing from   Act on what your gut tells you to do, investigate if you think something is wrong   CPA's almost never find embezzlement in practices   Take a more holistic look, don't base everything about a person on one phenomenon    A lot of embezzlers won't take a vacation, will reassure you that they don't need money, will appear to have a sudden increase in money, and will exhibit other major red flags   There is an embezzlement risk form on their website to see how at-risk you are    There is no way to 100% prevent embezzlement   Reviewing the reports your management software gives on your profit is a great way to deter stealing; print out reports yourself, never have them handed to you   It's a lot like putting an alarm system or locks on your house, you can make it harder or more imposing, but at the end of the day they can still break in   Nobody but the doctor knows that Prosperident is involved   Investigation is performed off-site, it takes about 8 weeks to go through with it, first 2 weeks are gathering information, the other 6 are for monitoring   Prosperident builds a duplicate of your software with your data and looks for a series of patterns that thieves use to steal money, most of these thieves are using more than one way to take from you  A lot of investigating is based on the suspect, and their role in the practice, bookkeepers might have direct access, while others may have to be more sneaky   Prosperident puts more work and attention to detail into investigating than the police can, you can bypass the police and go directly to the DA with your case to speed the legal process up   Up to $25,000 dollars will usually be covered by your insurance under employee dishonesty coverage, they will typically pay in 2-4 weeks   If you don't suspect anybody, but want to check so as to not become a victim, they will happily do so for you   Prosperident is also equipped to handle situations where there is a centralized group managing money among your many practices   There can be several independent thefts going on in the same practice, or partnerships   LINKS Website: https://www.prosperident.com/   CONTACTS Phone Number: (888)-398-2327 Twitter: @prosperident  

Best Financial Practices So You Can Keep the Money You Earn  Episode #270 with David Harris  “Embezzlement? That can never happen in my practice!” Well, it can — and most likely will — according to dental embezzlement expert, “professional cynic,” and CEO of Prosperident, David Harris. Today, on The Best Practices Show, Kirk Behrendt interviews David to reveal the shocking prevalence of financial fraud in dental practices. Using his vast experience from fraud investigation, David will teach you the best financial practices so that you keep the money you earn! For advice on how to avoid embezzlement in your practice, tune in to Episode 270 to learn more!  Main Takeaways:  - Embezzlement is a huge problem in dentistry. Don't assume it won't happen to you! - It can happen multiple times.  - Do a basic comparison between the software and the bank.  - Outsource a separate set of eyes to third parties.  - There is a knowledge gap between doctors and staff.  - Dentists should supervise the staff's day-in process that they don't understand. - Get direct, not indirect, information.  - Most dentists are unfamiliar with their practice management software.  - The wreckage of embezzlement goes way beyond the money.  Quotes:  - “80% of dentists will get embezzled, sooner or later.” (03:31—03:04)  - “The worst thing a dentist can do in terms of setting themselves up for embezzlement is to hire somebody who knows how to do it.” (05:42—05:47)  - “35% of dentists don't compare how much money the software says was collected with what went in the bank. If that isn't done, what you're doing is you're opening the door to the stupidest, laziest thief on the planet.” (07:32—07:49)  - “Sometimes embezzlement, I think, started by accident.” (14:06—14:09) - “There's almost inevitably a knowledge gap between the staff member and the doctor in certain areas, and not in the doctor's favor.” (15:17—15:24)  - “[Some dentists] tend to feel like, ‘I have more education than this person. My IQ's probably higher than theirs. And therefore, in a battle of wits, I should prevail.' It's just not that simple. These folks know a lot more than the doctor about the things that are relevant to stealing.” (16:17—16:39)  - “Transparency is the first casualty of embezzlement.” (21:39—21:41)  - “If you hire somebody who is inherently a thief, it's a ticking time bomb. And you can't watch everything that would need to be watched to prevent that.” (24:12—24:25)  - “Not every embezzlement is attributable to a bad hiring decision.” (25:15—25:18)  - “The problem with the software is called D-O-C-T-O-R. Most software comes out of the box pretty secure. And then, people in the practice do things to undermine it.” (29:31—29:43)  - “It's not like there's going to be a COVID-19 that hits computers, and you come into your practice one morning and they're all gone. That's not going to happen. For the rest of your career, whether it's two years or 30 years, that practice management software is going to be really important to you. So, let's acknowledge that and quit hoping that it just disappears one day.” (51:17—51:41)  - “Trust, but verify.” (52:19—52:20)  - “People are self-interested creatures. And it's hard for dentists to remember that and to govern themselves based on that certainty.” (55:37—55:53)  Snippets:  - David's background. (02:22—02:32)  - The problem of embezzlement in dentistry. (02:57—04:34)  - The “million-dollar club” and serial embezzlers. (05:09—05:59)  - Best financial practices. (06:49—09:25)  - The dynamics of trust. (10:23—13:28)  - How embezzlement starts in a practice. (14:04—16:39)  - What does outsourcing really mean? (17:03—19:19)  - Do I tell staff about third-party bookkeeping? (19:45—20:56)  - The best team members love accountability....

In this week's episode of the Associates on Fire podcast, we have CEO and founder of Prosperident, David Harris. Prosperident is the world's oldest and largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against general dentists and dental specialists. David shares several embezzlement stories his firm has uncovered and goes through a number of methods to identify at-risk areas for embezzlement in your dental practice.

David Harris may have the coolest job in dentistry. He gets to chase, and catch, those who steal from dentists. A rule-breaker in his youth, David changed his direction and has spent much of his adult life in the world of investigation and enforcement, where he uses his unrivaled ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dentists. David is the Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. David is a Forensic CPA, a Certified Fraud Examiner and a licensed private investigator. He is the author of the book Dental Embezzlement: The Art of Theft and the Science of Control, and over 30 articles in dental publications. In addition to being a prolific author, David is a frequent presenter at regional, national, and international dental conferences, and his vast wealth of experience, coupled with his keen sense of humor make David both an engaging and entertaining speaker.   SHOW NOTES: There are a lot of behavioural red flags that practice owners can look out for: Territoriality Reluctance to take vacation Those people that are spending more alone time in the office Conspicuous display of honesty Those people that can cut ethical corners   REFERENCE: Dental Embezzlement: The Art of Theft and the Science of Control Growing Your Business! by David Harris Everything Is Marketing by Fred Joyal For more info you and any queries you can go to www.dentalembezzlement.com.   DINO'S BIO: Dino Watt is a dynamic, highly sought after keynote speaker, private practice business advisor, best selling author, and certified body language and communication expert. As a business relationship expert, Dino understands that people are the heart of any business. His interactive training style will bring your audience to roaring laughter and move them to tears. Whether he is training on C.O.R.E Culture, Sales and Sales Support, or Making love and business work, your audience will rave about Dino and the energy he brings to every event. Dino has spoken for MKS, American Association of Orthodontists, PCSO, Pitts Progressive Study Group, The Shulman Study Club, Keller Williams, Sotheby's, DentalTown, Ortho2, OrthoVoice, and many others. Out of all the accolades Dino has received, the one he is proudest of is title of PHD, Passionate Husband and Dad. Dino has been married to his wife Shannon for 24 years and together they have raised 3 amazing adults.

In this episode Ken Kaufman, CFO of Community Dental Partners, guests hosts for Emmet, and interviews David Harris, CEO of Prosperident, the world’s largest Dental Embezzlement Investigation Firm. They discuss how DSOs can shield their businesses from embezzlement and fraud plus the risks to be aware of. David shares the fascinating story of how he started his career in this field, insight into the mind of the embezzler, and more. Learn how to keep your DSO safe from the threat you may not see coming and listen to this podcast!

David Harris has been embezzlement busting for over 30 years. He is a certified fraud examiner, financial investigator, CPA and skilled in financial forensics. As the CEO of Prosperident he’s seen countless cases of theft and financial mismanagement and today he’s sharing some steps that dentists can take to mitigate the embezzlement in their office. In this episode of the Grow Your Dental Practice Podcast, host Mohamed Ismail is talking with David Harris about his embezzlement investigating past, how common embezzlement really is and what dentists can do to mitigate it. They’re going to dig into the details of the dental hiring process, how to spot fraud and what to do if you suspect it.  Join us for an in-depth discussion of: How embezzlement happens in a dental clinic and why it’s so hard to detect How you can modify your hiring practices to help nip the embezzlement bud in the front What reports you need to pull and look at on a daily, weekly and monthly basis How mistakes happen How to spot suspicious financial activity within your practice  What to do if you suspect embezzlement (and a horror story about what can happen if you act too quickly) Embezzlement lessons that have come from the COVID pandemic How embezzlement has changed throughout the years But it’s not all doom and gloom on this episode, David is also going to share with us the most ridiculous embezzlement case he’s come across.  If you want to reach out to David directly, you can do so at: www.dentalembezzlement.com1 (888) 398-2327david@dentalembezzlement.com Hear the full interview by listening to the episode. If you like this episode, please rate and review it on your podcast app of choice and share it with friends, family or colleagues you think would find it valuable. The Grow Your Dental Practice Podcast is hosted by Mohamed Ismail, founder of Shift Accounting. Mohamed is a cloud accounting expert and business advisor that works with dental and medical professionals. Shift Accounting is a Canadian digital firm that help their dental and medical clients reach their financial goals with their superior business consulting and bookkeeping services. Shift provides clients with financial insights that help them improve their profitability and achieve their goals faster. This episode was sponsored by Xero, a cloud-based accounting software that Shift Accounting uses for all their clients. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your favourite podcatching app. You can find more information at Shift Accounting by visiting www.shiftacct.com or reach out to Mohamed Ismail directly at info@shiftacct.com. This episode of the Grow Your Dental Practice Podcast was produced by Tae Haahr and edited by Grace Njoki. Its theme music “Happy Energetic Indie Rock” by Xena_Ann is licenced through Audio Jungle.

David Harris is the CEO of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. He is a forensic accountant, a licensed private investigator, and a CPA. He is the author of the book Dental Embezzlement: The Art of Theft and the Science of Control and over 30 articles in dental publications.  In addition to being a prolific author, David is a frequent presenter at regional, national, and international dental conferences, and his vast wealth of experience coupled with his keen sense of humor make him both an engaging and entertaining speaker. David was a rule breaker in his youth and changed his direction and spent much of his adult life in the world of investigation and enforcement, where he now uses his unrivaled ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dentists. In this episode… Dentists and orthodontists hire people to help them in running their dental practices so that they can concentrate on providing dental care services to their patients without having to worry about office administration duties. However, some employees often take advantage of their employers and embezzle the office's money or assets. The dentists may or may not realize this until it's too late, and when they do, they often don't know what actions to take.  In this episode, Craig Weiss and Dr. Blair Feldman is joined by David Harris, a dentistry embezzlement expert, to talk about common types of embezzlement issues he often encounters in dental and orthodontic' practices, how his approach to the cases have evolved over the years, the kind of recommendations and advice he gives to his clients on how to fix the problem, and find out his best tips on how to avoid embezzlement problems. Stay tuned.

Do you know of a practice that has been a victim of embezzlement? The American Dental Association recently did a survey on observed behaviors exhibited by embezzlers. These behaviors included: possessiveness of workspace, reluctant to crosstrain, bullying, complaining, vacation reluctant, living beyond their means, and defensive attitude when questioned about their work. These outcomes were presented in a pie chart with a percentage so let me give you the top 3 percentages: number 1: Possessiveness about duties and lack of cross training other team members is 48%, number 2: defensiveness when questioned about their work is 37% and coming in at number 3: bullying and complaining is 31%. In this week's episode I have the pleasure of interviewing David Harris. David is the CEO of Properident which is the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dental practices. A rule breaker in his youth- David changed his direction and has spent much of his adult life in the world of investigation and enforcement where he uses his unrivaled ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dental practice owners.Join the FOOF Community Connect with David Harriswww.dentalembezzlement.comOther links Mentioned:https://www.prosperident.com/category/prosperident-newsletters/

A rule-breaker in his youth, David Harris changed his direction and has spent much of his adult life in the world of investigation and enforcement, where he uses his unrivaled ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dentists. David is the Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. David is a licensed private investigator, a CPA, and is “dual certified” in fraud investigation. David is a prolific author and frequent guest speaker at regional, national and international dental conferences and his vast wealth of experience, coupled with his keen sense of humor make David both an engaging and entertaining speaker.

“Next to military personnel, the most predictable people in the world have DDS or DMD after their name,” says today’s guest David Harris. “Which means it’s pretty easy for embezzlers to exploit.” A self-proclaimed rule-breaker in his youth, David changed his direction and spent most of his adult life in investigation and enforcement. David now serves as the CEO of Prosperident, the world’s largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists, where he uses his ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dentists.  Join Dr. Chad Johnson, Regan Robertson, and David for a conversation about how: How to protect yourself during the hiring process Most embezzlement cases are caught To use the Prosperident Hall of Shame to help Check out David’s book Dental Embezzlement on Amazon.

A rule-breaker in his youth, David Harris changed his direction and has spent much of his adult life in the world of investigation and enforcement, where he uses his unrivaled ability to understand the criminal thought process to help educate and protect dentists. David is the Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. David is a licensed private investigator, a CPA, and is “dual certified” in fraud investigation. He has lectured at universities in four countries in the faculties of business, law and dentistry. David is a prolific author and frequent guest speaker at regional, national and international dental conferences and his vast wealth of experience, coupled with his keen sense of humor makes David both an engaging and entertaining speaker. What You Will Learn: How David Harris and Prosperident are helping to educate and protect dental professionals from fraud and embezzlement Ways to identify fraud in your practice Understanding the security benefits of balancing daily and monthly The impact of technological change on your money flow The importance of familiarizing yourself with practice management software How David Harris conducts a fraud investigation What to do if you suspect fraud in your practice The risks of trying to handle a fraud or embezzlement scenario yourself How to contact Dr. Mark Costes: Website: www.dentalembezzlement.com Email: david@dentalembezzlement.com

David Harris joins the podcast to talk about how prevalent Dental Office Embezzlement is occurring in dental practices all over the world. If the signs are there, you need to listen! David Harris is the CEO of Prosperident, Dentistry's Embezzlement Experts. David invesigates financial crimes committed against general dentist and dental specialists.

Part 1 of a 2 part episode. Dr. Gina Dorfman talks with David Harris, CEO of Prosperident, the world’s oldest and largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against general dentists and dental specialists. In this episode, David talks about embezzlement specifically in dentistry, patterns to look for, and why it happens. You don't want to miss this episode! Learn more about Prosperident at https://www.prosperident.com/our-team/

Part 1 of a 2 part episode. Dr. Gina Dorfman talks with David Harris, CEO of Prosperident, the world’s oldest and largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against general dentists and dental specialists. In this episode, David talks about embezzlement specifically in dentistry, patterns to look for, and why it happens. You don't want to miss this episode! Learn more about Prosperident at https://www.prosperident.com/our-team/

Ryan takes the mic on this Dentist Money™ podcast. His guest is David Harris, founder of Prosperident, a forensic investigation firm that specializes in investigating, and protecting dentists from, embezzlement. If you think embezzlement won't happen to you, statistics show it's highly likely to occur during your career. Ryan and David discuss what leads people to embezzle; they profile what a typical embezzler might look like, and they give you warning signs that might tip you off that something is awry.

The majority of listeners to this podcast will be victims of embezzlement. Statistics support that statement. David Harris from Prosperident will teach you easy and simple techniques to prevent becoming a victim. New grad or seasoned veteran, you need to hear this.

On today's episode, we sit down with embezzlement investigation expert David Harris. How prevalent is embezzlement in dental practices and what can you do about it? If you think it can't happen to you, please listen to this podcast.David is the founder and chief executive officer of Propserident. David had the idea for his company after a friend of his who was a dentist asked him to help figure out if one of his employees was stealing from him. As it turns out, they were embezzling, but this provided David with the idea for a new company. 30 years later, Prosperident has become the leader in investigating dental embezzlement cases around the world.For more informationhttps://www.prosperident.com/

It's one of those topics that's tough to talk about, dental embezzlement. Dental practices are built on a sense of trust and teamwork. The familiar, close-knit nature of the dental industry makes it nearly impossible to want to confront the possibility that there is the occurrence of embezzlement in the dental office. In this episode, dentistry's foremost expert on embezzlement, David Harris, shares tips and trick to keep your practice safe. Further, David has offered all listeners this free embezzlement quiz for you to see if your practice could be a victim. David is the CEO of Prosperident, an investigation agency that is the premier dental embezzlement investigation agency. If you're looking for the ultimate dental podcast, look no further! The Dental Experience Podcast, hosted by Ryan Vet, is full of tips and tricks to help all dental professionals succeed. This week, find Ryan Vet speaking the San Diego Dental Convention. If you're looking for a dental speaker, be sure to get in touch with Ryan's team for your next trade show or study club.

The Dental Amigos were happy to host David Harris, Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world's largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists. In addition to being a good guy, David is a licensed private investigator, a CPA who is “dual certified” in fraud investigation and a tremendous resource for the dental industry. Paul and Rob chatted with David Harris about employee theft and fraud in dental practices: “Needy Thieves v. Greedy Thieves,” the Fraud Triangle and the importance of the distinction between “Delegation” and “Abdication” in dental practices. Our listeners can contact David Harris at david@dentalembezzlement.com, through his firm's aptly titled website at www.dentalembezzlement.com or by calling 888-398-2327. David has also graciously made his Embezzlement Risk Assessment Questionnaire available for free through February 28, 2019 for our listeners (regularly a $139.00 value) which can be accessed by clicking the following link: https://www.prosperident.com/embezzlement-risk-assessment-questionnaire-giveaway-for-dental-nachos/

Interview with David Harris, CEO of Prosperident. We discuss signs to look for in an embezzler, what to do if you suspect it, and what happens if you uncover it. Go to https://www.prosperident.com/ for more! I can be reached at Sarah.kidd@pattersondental.com for questions or comments! If you have a subject you'd like me to address, please shoot me a note! Thanks for supporting and remember to leave a review before you leave! :) **DAVID WILL BE IN LOS ANGELES AT THE PATTERSON BRANCH ON JANUARY 17 - REACH OUT FOR DETAILS** --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dentalbrightbites/support

David Harris founded the company that became Prosperident in 1989, and built it into the world’s largest firm specializing in the investigation of financial crimes committed against dentists. Prosperident’s team of specialized investigators is consulted...

David Harris is Prosperident's Chief Executive Officer. Overcoming a troubled adolescence, David Harris has become Dentistry's Embezzlement Expert. David founded the company that became Prosperident in 1989, and built it into the world's largest firm specializing in the investigation of financial crimes committed against dentists. Prosperident's team of specialized investigators is consulted on hundreds of frauds annually committed against both general dentists and dental specialists. David is a Certified Fraud Examiner and a licensed private investigator. He has a graduate degree in applied mathematics and a CPA. David also belongs to several organizations for dental consultants and speakers. David has been interviewed on the subject of embezzlement by every leading dental publication. He is also a prolific writer and authors a dozen or more articles annually that appear in major dental publications. David has lectured at universities in three countries in the faculties of business, law and dentistry. In addition to his investigative successes, David in considerable demand as a speaker. He normally speaks to dental audiences fifty or more times per year and has been described as a highly entertaining and engaging speaker who draws on a vast amount of experience in his field. For more information on having David as a speaker, please click HERE. David says that his favorite moment is hearing the noise that a prison cell door makes when it clicks shut on an embezzler. Contact David using these links: dentalembezzlement.com emergency@dentalembezzlement.com To request the Embezzlement Risk Questionnaire, send an email to request@dentalembezzlement.com To contact our hosts, please email help@veritasdentalresources.com.

Embezzlement. It may be an uncomfortable topic that not many of us want to think about, but it’s something that we need to consider. While we all want to believe that our staff is trustworthy and honest, the truth is that embezzlement can happen to any of us. Just ask today’s guest, David Harris. Dentistry’s embezzlement expert, David is a Certified Fraud Examiner and a licensed private investigator. He serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, the world’s largest firm specializing in the investigation of crimes against dentists, and his team of specialized investigators is consulted on hundreds of frauds annually. An in-demand speaker who typically talks to dental audiences 50 or more times per year, David is here today to speak on the uncomfortable subject that affects more dentists than you might think. Don’t miss his tips on identifying embezzlement, as well as what to do (and what not to do) if you suspect something suspicious is going on in your own office. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: http://bit.ly/2yVKmf2 

Well, it turns out the three of us know absolutely nothing about embezzlement, hiring, or firing! But seriously, this was a very eye opening for all of us as I am sure it will be for you. David Harris is a private investigator, cpa, and now embezzlement specialist in Dentistry. In this episode, he points out a lot of eye opening facts and figures on dental embezzlement. It's a real deal and could be affecting you right now! He is super open and candid about what we need to do and how we can avoid being embezzled from. David's company, Prosperident is all about helping dentists avoid this. If you personally have a suspicion that something is going on I wouldn't hesitate to recommend his company to investigate. They do it in a very stealth way that is completely hidden from everyone. He actually is giving our listeners a questionnaire that usually runs $129 through the end of 2017. Its free here, https://www.prosperident.com/prosperidents-embezzlement-risk-assessment-questionnaire/. -David's Contact info -888-398-2237 -emergency@dentalembezzlement.com

Bulletproof Dental Practice Podcast Episode 39 Hosts: Dr. Peter Boulden & Dr. Craig Spodak Guest: David Harris, founder & CEO of Prosperident Watch the full video of interview by clicking here! Key Takeaways: At least 60% of dentists will be embezzled from, but the actual percentage is probably higher. Understanding WHY people steal will help in profiling an embezzler. People steal for 2 reasons: need & greed. Thieves want to be alone when they steal. Keep an eye out for employees who are coming in early, leaving late, or otherwise coming and going at strange times. Be familiar with your practice management software’s daily and monthly financial reports, and run / print those reports yourself. Don’t give anyone the option to report selectively. The Office Manager generally has the most opportunity for financial theft, but anyone at the front desk can be capable as well. Any form of wealth transfer to you can be intercepted; cash, check, ACH, sale of dental supplies, time, you name it. Most embezzlement is not found through audits, but by watching employee behavior. Look for staff members who have money issues, compulsive behavior, who never take vacation, staff members who always resist change, who are territorial, resistant to outside advisors, resistant to upgrades, etc. Less than 1/3 of embezzlement is discovered through a financial anomaly. The other 2/3 of embezzlement is discovered based on watching employee behavior. Many dentists feel ashamed about finding they’ve been embezzled from, but in reality it is not the dentist that caused it, and there is no reason to feel ashamed. There’s no way to totally safe-proof your business, but you can work to catch embezzlement early on. Shift your attention from prevention to detection. Proper background checks during hiring are the BEST way to safeguard your business from embezzlement. When hiring a new employee, talk to all previous employers for the last 5 years. Don’t call the phone number given to you by the potential new hire, instead google them and call the number found there. Ask for exact start date and exact end date, compare those to the resume. You’re looking for discrepancies that may indicate hidden jobs. Confirm job title. The best question to ask is, “Would you rehire this person again if you had a job opening and they were available?” 1 in 4 adults in the US has a criminal record. Prosperident offers a range of products designed to help you put systems in place to aide in preventing embezzlement, and they also offer investigation products should you suspect an embezzler may be at work in your business.

In this episode, we are joined by David Harris, certified fraud investigator and CEO of Prosperident. We discuss steps dentists can take to prevent embezzlement, hiring techniques to select new employees, types of embezzlers, what to look for if a dentist suspects they are being embezzled, and many other aspects of embezzlement. These topics are important for an experienced dentist or a dental student who is preparing for private practice. We'd love you to join us!  Contact Dental Realist: Twitter: @dentalrealist Email: dentalrealist@gmail.com LinkedIn: Dental Realist Facebook: Dental Realist Website: www.dentalrealist.com

It's a fact: two-thirds of dentists will be embezzlement during their career. Over 6,000 dentists will be embezzled, resulting in over $180 million in losses.  That's pretty scary, right?  Think it can't happen to you?  Think again.  We take a break from our normal shenanigans (and lack of content) to talk about something serious. David Harris is Prosperident's Chief Executive Officer. Overcoming a troubled adolescence, David Harris has become the world's leading expert on dental office embezzlement. He is the CEO of Prosperident, the world's largest dental embezzlement investigation firm. Prosperident's team of specialized investigators is consulted on hundreds of frauds annually committed against both general dentists and dental specialists. David has had the distinct pleasure of hearing cell doors slam shut on many embezzlers. David is a CPA and a licensed private investigator.  He has a graduate degree in applied mathematics and is “dual certified” in fraud investigation – he possesses both the Certified Fraud Examiner designation from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and the Certified in Financial Forensics designation from the American Association of Certified Public Accountants. David is a Mensa member and belongs to several organizations for dental consultants and speakers. David has been interviewed on the subject of embezzlement by many leading dental publications and organizations. He is also a prolific writer and authors or co-authors a dozen or more articles annually that appear in major dental publications. David has lectured at several US and Canadian universities in the faculties of business, law and dentistry. David is a highly entertaining and engaging speaker who draws on a vast amount of experience in his field.  He says that his favorite moment is hearing the noise that a prison cell door makes when it clicks shut on an embezzler. Want more information about the growing issue of embezzelment in the dental industry?  Definitely e-mail David at david@dentalembezzlement.com and visit his website at www.dentalembezzlement.com before your suspicions turn into reality. Stay tuned for part two coming up on Tuesday!

DENTAL SERIES: David Harris, Chief Executive Officer of Prosperident, is a guest as part of our on-going podcast series featuring the leaders in the dental industry. Prosperident is the world’s largest dental embezzlement investigation firm. Listen to hear our discussion on fraud in dental practices.             The post Oberman Law Firm – David Harris and Dental Embezzlement appeared first on Oberman Law Firm.

You might be surprised how hard it is to prevent embezzlement in the dental office! As David Harris of Prosperident explains, the conventional solutions that everyone thinks of often don't do the trick. Individual log ins to practice management software are great, but easy to get around. Cameras and keyloggers are fine as long as you know when to look! So what's the real tip off? Behavior. David and the Dental Hacks dig into what kinds of behavior you might look for that could give away an embezzling employee. Plus, David is offering Prosperident's embezzlement risk assessment for free if you use the code: "dentalhacks." The Brain Trust gets serious about charting in episode 96. That sounds boring but I promise you it's not! What kind of templates are available? What kind of red flags should you look for with regard to patients you might want to chart in more detail? How do you avoid getting "landed on?" All questions that Dr. Lance Timmerman, Dr. Melissa Zettler and Dr. Richard Low consider in detail! Go Hack Yourself: Jason: Williams Dental Lab Alan: Simply CE and the Business of Dentistry Podcast If you have any questions or comments for us please drop us an email at info@dentalhacks.com or find us (and like us!) at www.facebook.com/dentalhacks. Or, if you prefer...give us a call at (866) 223-5257 and leave us a message. You might be played in the show! If you like us, why not leave us a review on iTunes? It helps us get found by like minded people and might even help us get into "What's Hot" in the iTunes store! Go to this link and let the world know about the DentalHacks! Finally, if you aren't an Apple person, consider reviewing us on Stitcher at: stitcher.com/podcast/the-dentalhacks-podcast! If you would like to support the podcast you can check out our Patreon page! Although the show will always remain free to download, our Patreon supporters get access to special bonus content including (at least) one extra podcast episode every months! Also be sure to check out the Dental Hacks swag store where you can find t-shirts, stickers coffee mugs and all sorts of other things that let the world know you're a part of the Hacks Nation!

Embezzlement is a problem in dentistry. David Harris of Prosperident isjoins the Dental Hacks in episode 95 to tell us just how big aproblem it is. David thinks that dentists are particularlysusceptible because we're an altruistic bunch that isn't very goodat weeding out the criminal element when we hire. His solution:you've got to think like a criminal. Every dentist needs to hearhis message and the Dental Hacks deliver in a powerful andentertaining way. Plus, David is offering Prosperident's embezzlement risk assessment for freeif you use the code: "dentalhacks."The Brain Trust takes on a different difficulty that dentistsface. Dr. Melissa Zettler, Dr. Lance Timmerman and Dr. Richard Lowjoin Alan to talk about charting. How much of charting is done toCYA? Are some people more likely to get in trouble for chartingthan others? The Brain Trust's take on a dry subject is at timeshilarious and always powerful. Also, if you have suggestions aboutthorough charting tips, we want to hear them! (Brain Trust startsat 47:40)Show links:AlienMilling TechnologiesGo Hack Yourself:Jason: USDI Ortho seminarsAlan: Triodent Supercurve matricesIf you have any questions or comments for us please drop us anemail at info@dentalhacks.com or find us (and like us!)at www.facebook.com/dentalhacks. Or, if you prefer...giveus a call at (866) 223-5257 and leave us a message. You might beplayed in the show! If you like us, why not leave us a review oniTunes? It helps us get found by like minded people and might evenhelp us get into "What's Hot" in the iTunes store! Goto this link and let the world know about theDentalHacks! Finally, if you aren't an Apple person, considerreviewing us on Stitcher at: stitcher.com/podcast/the-dentalhacks-podcast!If you would like to support the podcast you can check out ourPatreon page! Although the show will alwaysremain free to download, our Patreon supporters get access tospecial bonus content including (at least) one extra podcastepisode every months! Also be sure to check out the Dental Hacks swagstore where you can find t-shirts, stickers coffee mugs and allsorts of other things that let the world know you're a part of theHacks Nation!

Embezzlement exert David Harris and software entrepreneur Manuel Barroso have teamed up to help you predict embezzlement in real time.     Overcoming a troubled adolescence, David Harris has become the world’s leading expert on dental office embezzlement. He is the CEO of Prosperident, the world’s largest dental embezzlement investigation firm. Prosperident’s team of specialized investigators is consulted on hundreds of frauds annually committed against both general dentists and dental specialists. David has had the distinct pleasure of hearing cell doors slam shut on many embezzlers. David is a licensed private investigator with a graduate degree in applied mathematics and a CPA. David is “dual certified” in fraud investigation – he possesses both the Certified Fraud Examiner designation from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and the Certified in Financial Forensics designation from the American Institute of CPAs. David is a Mensa member and belongs to several organizations for dental consultants and speakers. David has been interviewed on the subject of embezzlement by many leading dental publications and organizations. He is also a prolific writer and authors or co-authors a dozen or more articles annually that appear in major dental publications. David has lectured at several US and Canadian universities in the faculties of business, law and dentistry. David has spoken at regional, national and international dental conferences. He is a highly entertaining and engaging speaker who draws on a vast amount of experience in his field.     www.dentalembezzlement.com  888-398-2327 david@dentalembezzlement.com

Listen in to learn some of the amazing, shocking statistics behind embezzlement. The first step to detecting embezzlement is understanding the problem.   Overcoming a troubled adolescence, David Harris has become the world’s leading expert on dental office embezzlement. He is the CEO of Prosperident, the world’s largest dental embezzlement investigation firm. Prosperident’s team of specialized investigators is consulted on hundreds of frauds annually committed against both general dentists and dental specialists. David has had the distinct pleasure of hearing cell doors slam shut on many embezzlers. David is a licensed private investigator with a graduate degree in applied mathematics and a CPA. David is “dual certified” in fraud investigation – he possesses both the Certified Fraud Examiner designation from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and the Certified in Financial Forensics designation from the American Institute of CPAs. David is a Mensa member and belongs to several organizations for dental consultants and speakers. David has been interviewed on the subject of embezzlement by many leading dental publications and organizations. He is also a prolific writer and authors or co-authors a dozen or more articles annually that appear in major dental publications. David has lectured at several US and Canadian universities in the faculties of business, law and dentistry. David has spoken at regional, national and international dental conferences. He is a highly entertaining and engaging speaker who draws on a vast amount of experience in his field.   Listen in to learn some of the amazing, shocking statistics behind embezzlement. The first step to detecting embezzlement is understanding the problem.

Listen or Subscribe on iTunes     Welcome to another episode of The Dentalpreneur. On today’s show we are talking with Wendy Askins. Wendy is the senior investigator at the world’s largest dental embezzlement firm, Prosperident. Wendy has over 25 years experience in the dental field, has an MBA, and degrees in physiology and criminology. […] The post 007: Wendy Askins – How to Identify and Deal with Dental Embezzlement in Your Office appeared first on Dental Success Institute Blog.

David Harris is the world’s leading expert on dental office embezzlement.  He is the CEO of Prosperident, the world’s largest dental embezzlement investigation firm.  Prosperident’s team of investigators is consulted on hundreds of frauds annually committed against dentists.  David has had the distinct pleasure of hearing cell doors slam shut on many embezzlers.