09/23/2026
You think someone is stealing from you. Here's what not to do: confront them without evidence.
When you confront on suspicion alone, the employee denies it, and now they know you're watching. The behavior stops, or moves, or gets more careful. And if you were wrong, you've damaged a good employee's trust in a way that rarely repairs.
What to do instead:
1️⃣ Write down what made you suspicious. Date, time, what you observed. Memory reshapes itself once you've formed a theory, and you'll want the original version later.
2️⃣ Don't announce that you're looking. No all-staff meeting about how "some things have come up." That's a warning shot, and everyone hears it.
3️⃣ Establish a pattern before you act on an incident. One void looks like a mistake. Forty voids on the same shift, same register is something else. Single incidents are arguable but patterns aren't.
4️⃣ Line up the data and the footage together. Transaction records tell you what was entered. Footage tells you what happened. Neither is conclusive alone, and the gap between them is where the answer usually is.
5️⃣ Involve HR, loss prevention, and, if it's significant, counsel before the conversation. Termination and prosecution both have procedural requirements that are easy to violate in the first ten minutes of an emotional confrontation.
6️⃣ Describe what you found. Don't announce what they did. "Here's what the record shows" holds up. "You stole from me" invites a defamation problem you don't need. The goal is to recover your losses with appropriate associate statements and restitution agreements.
