The nature of stolen property investigated by police varies widely over the course off a year but the boys in blue were in unfamiliar territory when the missing item was six hundred kilograms of Salmon that appeared to go missing on a daily basis.
A processing plant in Sydney's inner west processed premium Salmon products for the cities growing taste for this delicacy and its directors became concerned when the profit level dropped unexpectedly. They called in the auditors, who suggested police action was necessary.
It seems that six hundred kilograms of prime Salmon was missing every day and the investigation concluded that this was being written off as simply " waste " . The conclusion was that about 250 tonnes of Salmon had been stolen and this had a worth of $4 million dollars.
The police began questioning staff and soon two female clerical workers, aged 30 and 31 were under arrest. This led to three men aged 32, 30 and 49 who worked in the processing procedure to join them in the Campbelltown Magistrates court where all were charged with " larceny as clerks or servants " - and given bail. They will all reappear in court on February 22.
What is unusual is that these five trusted members of the company's staff acted as a cabal and managed to spirit tonnes of prime fish out the door with the discrepancy being written off as waste. The police are unsure if this theft occurred daily, or if a larger quantity was moved at irregular intervals. They are still investigating the likely end source of this stolen product.
The five people charged have been dismissed by their employer and it seems likely the company will recover from this loss, but the investigation will certainly make other businesses think long and hard about internal security. It seems evident that internal security controls were sufficiently lax that a plan to divert production for staff profit was able to go undetected for at least six months.
This case will highlight the imperative of having the company records subjected to regular inspection by an astute firm of auditors. A production loss of four million dollars would be glaringly evident and if it were explained away as simply an increase in waste in the production process a review of manufacturing would be called for.
Whenever a criminal case of this nature occurs, it brings into question the integrity of the board of management and the function of the senior people actually running daily operations.. Any significant drop in production output should spark an investigation to discover the cause.
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