Home>Levelset Community>Legal Help>We had an employee who kept cash and checks from customers. What’s the best way to handle this situation? Police report? Our customers said they paid him and a few checks have cleared their account.

We had an employee who kept cash and checks from customers. What’s the best way to handle this situation? Police report? Our customers said they paid him and a few checks have cleared their account.

Florida

We had an employee who reported to work smelling of alcohol with empty cans in truck. He was released of his duty immediately. He also kept cash and checks from customers. What’s the best way to handle this situation? Police report? Our customers said they paid him and a few checks have cleared their account. I’m not sure how often this has accrued.

1 reply

Apr 3, 2019

I'm terribly sorry to hear about that. I'll admit that this is a little outside my area of expertise - at the Construction Legal Center, we typically discuss payment disputes between construction businesses, and employee theft is not often brought up. For a little more expertise, sites like Avvo and JustAnswer might have lawyers and other professionals more familiar with situations like the one described above. With that in mind, there are still some general ideas that might apply here. For one, trying to resolve the matter without official legal action is generally preferable, if possible - involving legal claims or the police and certainly force someone's hand, but generally, those routes also take time and potentially expense. By using the threat of legal action or pressing charges, it might be possible to recover payment. When threats are sent via attorney letter, they tend to carry more weight. Alternatively, pressing charges for theft or taking legal action could help serve some justice while also potentially leading to recovering payment. Regardless - for missing customer checks that have been given to an employee accused of theft, it might be a good idea to talk to the parties who issued those checks about potentially canceling them. That way, the damage might be limited to checks aleady cleared. Good luck!

0 people found this helpful

Helpful