Martin is dead; has been for years. He smoked too much and cancer got him.
In some masculine sense, Martin was a bit larger than life. His ancestors were Danes. The logo on his construction company letterhead included a horned helmet. When I visited his office, located in a corner of the warehouse where he kept his construction equipment, I usually took a little time to look at the pictures on his walls. They included scenes of notable construction projects and photographs of the shack that had been his childhood home, as well as the scruffy bunch of kids that had been Martin and his siblings at an earlier age. In his adult life, Martin was a man's man.
This is not why he haunts me, and he does haunt me. What haunts me is the phone call; the call I received one sunny afternoon. This man, who would later die from cancer without complaining, was bawling like a baby. Between sobs, he blurted out to me that he had caught his bookkeeper, his trusted sister, stealing from him. He kept repeating, "If she had only told me, I'd have given her the money".
Over the course of his working life, criminologist Donald R. Cressey developed a theory. His final hypothesis, as reported by Joseph T. Wells in a highly acclaimed book titled OCCUPATIONAL FRAUD AND ABUSE was:
Trusted persons become trust violators when they conceive of themselves as having a financial problem which is nonsharable, are aware this problem can be secretly resolved by violation of the position of financial trust, and are able to apply to their own conduct in that situation verbalizations which enable them to adjust their conceptions of themselves as trusted persons with their conceptions of themselves as users of the entrusted funds or property.
I'll put it a bit more simply. Desperate people with no one to talk to and an ability to rationalize, given an opportunity, will steal.
While I viewed Martin as a bit larger than life, his wife had a different view. After his death, in the normal course of doing my work, I became acquainted with her view. With his wife and kids, Martin was not particularly attentive. He did not listen well, and his family suffered because of it. That may have had something to do with his sister's inability to confide her desperate circumstances.
As business people and employers we affect and sometimes direct peoples lives. As a result, we have both a responsibility and a duty to concern ourselves with their welfare, as well as our own. We can and should take positive steps to establish and maintain a workable trust.
We need to set boundaries; establish controls; divide the duties; do the accounting.
As importantly, we need to be attentive to the people. We need to keep an open door, an open mind, and an open ear. If we do those things we very well may save ourselves a bundle of money and a lot of grief.
We also might help some good person stay good.