Q&A: Gambling addiction encourages employees to steal from bosses

[Louis Cypher]

www.abc.net.au/worldtoday

The World Today - Tuesday, 16 September , 2003 12:18:00
Reporter: Julia Limb


ELIZABETH JACKSON: Problem gambling is well known as a trigger for theft – often from family and friends. But now some new research suggests that problem gamblers are also stealing from their employers.

The research from the University of Technology in Sydney reveals that gambling is the second biggest motivator for employees to steal from their boss, and that many people justify their theft by convincing themselves that they're simply borrowing the money.

Senior law lecturer Penny Crofts conducted the research by studying thousands of theft cases before the New South Wales courts, and she told The World Today's Julia Limb all about it.

PENNY CROFTS: Well, we looked at 2,700 files, and ended up ultimately with only about 63 files that were gambling related. To even come up with 63 court files was quite large, because the methodology tends to underestimate the incidence of gambling related crime.

But what this meant was we then had 63 files with a great deal of information about the person's gambling patterns, why they started offending, when they started offending, and also the relationship of the gambling to the crime.

JULIA LIMB: And what sort of people were committing these crimes?

PENNY CROFTS: This was probably one of the aspects that really struck me in the research, that these were really… the majority of these people were really ordinary people.

They had no criminal records, or maybe drink driving records – the majority – not all, and these people ended up losing their homes, their families, their partners, their jobs, possibly imprisonment, and you could see really clearly the sadness and the loss associated with people who had effectively lost control of their lives due to gambling.

And so, for example, one of the offenders was a cashier, you know, at a fruit store, and she was just pocketing the money once a week. Another guy was putting money in the automatic teller machine, and he would just, at the end of each week, he would be pinching money from that. And he wasn't caught for a year and a half.

So these people were really ordinary people who got away with offending for a long time and ended up stealing massive amounts because they'd been getting away with it for so long.

JULIA LIMB: What sort of amounts are we looking at? Are they really that big?

PENNY CROFTS: Looking at the people who stole from their employers, they stole… there were 27 of them altogether and they stole more than $2.5 million, ranging from $900 to $450,000, and the woman who stole $450,000 was actually 74, I think, by the time that she was caught, and she'd actually been stealing for 10 years from the surgery that she worked at as a receptionist, and she was just fiddling the books and got away with it for that long.

JULIA LIMB: And were you surprised at how many people were stealing from their employers to support their gambling habit?

PENNY CROFTS: I ended up with a finding of about 15 per cent of people who were charged with the offence of larceny by servant was gambling related. And as I said, this has been backed up by the Institute of Criminology.

And in some ways it's a surprise, but I guess what you've got to look at is well, what are the motivations for stealing from your boss? It's highly likely that you're going to get caught. It's a really risky thing to do. What's going to provide the motivation for long-term offending of this kind?

And, I mean, they found greed was the major motivation, and I can understand that gambling would be one of the next highest, because it provides people with a desperate need for money.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Penny Crofts, Senior Law Lecturer at Sydney's University of Technology. That report from Julia Limb.