Any company will face challenges, and the key to success is obvious – keep your bottom line in the black. Bringing income into the business is important, but so is reducing the overall costs that your company incurs regularly.

There are a lot of different things to consider in terms of reducing costs, and it's common for some areas to be overlooked completely. Insurance fraud and worker's compensation investigations, in particular, need to be addressed, and while it may not seem like your company needs them, the opposite could be true.

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This blog post is part of our continuing series of articles on how business owners and managers can protect themselves from a multitude of risks in the workplace by employing investigative and due diligence strategies.

Companies today have many different obstacles and challenges that they have to overcome. While their focus must be on servicing their customers, matching the competition, marketing effectively, and dealing with their day-to-day operations, it's also a must that businesses identify where they may be vulnerable to criminal activity, liability, or other threats to their viability.

The first step is simply to understand what kind of internal threats a business might face. Common threats include the following.

1) Employee Theft
Every year, millions of dollars are lost to employee dishonesty. A fairly recent example occurred in 2013 here in Long Island when a bookkeeper for an oil company plead guilty to stealing nearly $500,000 from her employer. Employee theft might take the form of through embezzlement, fraudulent billing schemes, theft of inventory or trade secrets, or even something as seemingly benign as stealing company supplies. Regardless of the methods used, employee theft is a very real problem, and one which can destroy the reputation and even continued existence of a company.

2) Corruption
Corruption in a business setting can take many forms. It includes:

• conflicts of interest (steering company contracts to vendors associated with the employee);
• bribery (paying money to government officials in order to get them to perform some kind of official act, such as access certain markets or avoid regulatory issues);
• extortion (obtaining property through threats or actual force and/or fear);
• kickbacks (receiving payments for steering company contracts to certain vendors);
• illegal gratuities (paying money to a government official after the official has provided some service to the company).

3) Compliance
From sexual harassment to failure to disclose certain information, employees who cause the business to slip into areas of noncompliance are setting it up for major legal repercussions that can be difficult or impossible to recover from.

Those are just some examples of the most common criminal or fraud-related threats that affect businesses internally. So just what can you do to help prevent these issues from occurring? There are a few steps worth remembering.

• Know the warning signs. Learn how to identify a potential problem. It could include excessive contact with one certain vendor, sloppy record-keeping, or an employee who seems to be living a lavish lifestyle that their salary can't support.
• Run regular audits that give you a look at employee spending and other areas of the business. This can help you identify potential areas that might be at risk.
• Use data monitoring tools and software that track the on-line or on-network activities of employees at work, in order to get a clear picture of who is doing what.
• Review vendor relationships periodically. Look at contracts and orders to ensure that an employee isn't using one single vendor excessively.
• Use background checks to ensure that you hire the right employees for any position and that you verify their history and credentials.
• Investigate if you observe red flags of misconduct. Professional investigators and fraud examiners are trained to spot fraud and related problems, and can provide a thorough, objective investigation of the situation as well as helping to solve the problem.

Keeping these points in mind – and keeping alert for any possible red flags of misconduct – can help insure the financial and physical safety of your business, as well as deter any possible future issues.

Most business leaders, understandably, focus their effort and attention on the day to day operations of managing their business and providing for their clients or customers. As a result, they are often unaware of, or not prepared to deal with, the significant risks they face from potential employee misconduct or criminal acts. In order to protect themselves, their businesses, and their customers, it is vitally important for any business owner to understand the various risks that employees could bring to the workplace and how to mitigate them.

Consider just some of the ways that employee activity could negatively impact your business:

• Workplace violence
• Embezzlement/theft in the workplace
• Fraud
• Negligent hiring liability
• Sexual misconduct
• Theft of trade secrets, proprietary information, or client confidential information
• Harm to reputation

In other words, your employees can have much more of an impact on your business' bottom line and on the safety of your workers than you realize. In order to get this issue under control, there are several steps you should consider taking. These include the following.

• Start by educating yourself. Spend time learning about the possible risks your business may face, how it impacts your business, and what warning signs might exist that show the issue is present in your business. The same risk factors do not apply to every business!
• Inform others in the workplace. Often, criminal issues are identified by coworkers and reported to management. The fact is that employee criminal activity can lead to a negative workplace environment for everyone, and many team members will be on the lookout for these issues, too.
• Turn to the experts. By retaining professional investigators, particularly those with experience conducting background and due diligence investigations, you can greatly reduce the risks associated with any potential or current employee. You can use private investigators to help with employee screening during the hiring process as well as to run internal investigations into any potential issues within your business.
• Use the right tools. There are numerous tools that can help mitigate the risk of potentially harmful employee activity. These range from automated payroll and financial systems to security cameras to internal computer network monitoring systems. By using the tools available you'll give yourself and your employees a safer work environment.

The key here is to be vigilant. By knowing what to look for and understanding what steps to take to correct any issues, you'll be able to start working towards a safer and more productive workplace.

Below is a list of asset services our New York and long island private investigators can perform. These services are not limited to asset searches and can also include other miscellaneous searches that can be very helpful to whoever may need them, such as the following:

• Vehicle Registration or Plate Number- You provide VIN# or license plate #, results in name and address where registered, type of vehicle and lien holder information
• Real Property- You provide name/ssn, results in search of all 50 states, with first 10 hits included
• SSN Search- You provide name/address/dob, results in full non-truncated ssn
• Education Verification- You provide name/aka/dob and ssn/college/university attended, results in attendance dates, degree and/or major
• Reverse Email- You provide email address, results in subscriber information

The  private detectives at Radius Investigations can perform a variety of phone searches for a multitude of reasons, including to locate missing persons or a missing child.

Below is the services we provide along with what information we need from you in each type of service.

• Reverse Landline Phone Number- You provide phone number, results in name and physical address;
• Reverse Cell Phone Number- You provide phone number, results in billing name and address;
• Find Phone Number- You provide physical address/ Old Non Pub, results in current phone number at the address provided;
• Find Cell Phone Number- You provide name/ssn/current or last known address/ home phone, results in cell phone number;
• Reverse Canadian Landline Number- You provide phone number, results in cell phone number;
• Reverse Canadian Cell Phone Number- You provide phone number, results in name and address;
• Reverse Toll Free Number- You provide toll free number, results in name/address;
• Full Locate (Verified)- You provide name/ssn/dob/last known address/phone, results in verified current address/ contact number;
• Reverse PO box- You provide name/PO box address, results in name and physical address; and
• Private Mail box/ Post Mail Box- You provide name/mail box address, results in name and physical address.