Aussie retail staff among top thieves

Australian retail staff have the world's greatest propensity for theft from their employer, costing the industry almost $3 billion, a survey finds.

The second annual Global Retail Theft Barometer found Australian retailers experienced the world's highest rate of employee theft and fraud and that the illegal activity cost the sector almost $3 billion over the past 12 months.

The cost of employee theft - or "shrinkage loss" - as it is termed in the industry, is usually passed on to consumers.

The survey estimated that the shortfall cost each Australian household almost $426, the equivalent of two weeks of grocery shopping for the average household.

The study was prepared by the Centre for Retail Research, England and was published on Tuesday by Checkpoint Systems Inc, a supplier of radio-frequency electronic article surveillance systems to prevent stock loss.

Checkpoint managing director Mark Gentle said Australian retailers rarely addressed internal theft despite investing heavily in different security systems to prevent stock loss from external sources.

"Australia is sophisticated in its approach to shrinkage and a lot of work has gone on aimed at external theft," Mr Gentle said.

"This has reduced customer shop lifting by 2.05 per cent compared to last year, now the challenge is what do we do with internal theft."

Mr Gentle said the cost of retail shrinkage was borne by consumers.

"Whilst shrink is a serious threat to retailers' bottom lines, the hidden tax on consumers is an additional unfair hit, especially as they are already dealing with the strain of tightening household budgets during the economic downturn."

The study found that employee were surprisingly consistent in their choice of goods to thieve, regardless of geographic region.

They favoured razor blades, shaving products, cosmetics, face creams, perfumes, alcohol, fresh meat/expensive foodstuffs, infant formula, CDs and DVDs, fashion, electronic games, cellular phones and watches.

Retailers estimated that, on average, they lost between two and five per cent of the value of new product lines to theft.

Popular products such as Harry Potter books, electronic games and recent DVDs experienced loss levels of up to eight per cent, causing supply shortages.

The theft survey was based on data from a confidential surveys of 920 large retailers worldwide, with combined sales of $US814 billion ($A1.22 trillion).

money.ninemsn 11 Nov 2008

Technically, the statement above (Aussie retail staff among top thieves) by the mass media is deliberately misleading (false).

Corporate Crime is Australia's largest financial burden. The problem generally is that what makes light in the mass media, is only a fraction of what is going on behind closed doors.

Examples of this are as follows are only a small part of the bigger picture.

Christopher Skase (Quintex) > $1,000,000,000
Richard Pratt > $750,000,000
Alan Bond > $1,000,000,000
Telstra > $10,000,000 per annum
Rene Rivkin > $50,000,000
Henry Kaye (Eugene Kukuy) > $30,000,000
Steve Vizard $3,000,000

The LARGEST problem is that the court systems supports these types of crimes, and as put by the ABC's 7:30 Report : Alan Bond walks free. A quote taken from ketupa.net/bond.htm states it how it is : "Just one fraud committed by businessman Alan Bond was worth the same amount as every single household burglary committed in Australia over 18 months."

With ALL of the above mentioned individuals, they are SET FREE by the Australian court system.

They are only the people who take the wrap. Behind them there are others that help. If these matters were to be taken seriously, then the people behind them would be exposed, i.e. lawmakers, politicians, business executives.