There are three commonly accepted circumstances necessary for fraud to occur: economic need, opportunity and failure of conscience. Although you might not be able to really change economic need or failure of conscience, you can deter theft by eliminating the opportunity for employees to steal with Avero Loss Prevention, the fastest way to automatically detect theft and prevent future fraud.
One type of scam that’s more common than you think involves employees to self-authorizing promotions in the POS. By “self-authorizing” we mean that the POS doesn’t require the employee to have a manager swipe a card or enter a code; instead, the employee can authorize his or her own promotions in the POS.
- How it works: A guest dines at the restaurant and pays with cash. After the guest leaves the server goes into the check in the POS system and uses a void or promotion to reduce the amount owed, pocketing the cash difference.
- Why it works: This may sound like the Cash Coupon abuse scam, but in this situation the server doesn’t need manager authorization to process the void or promotion. You may be thinking that there’s no reason why a server should be able to use a void or promotion without manager approval, but it happens frequently – the restaurant/bar is too busy to have managers authorize every promotion so they give servers the authorization rights, or the promotion is something like ‘happy hour’ so the restaurant isn’t worried about the server taking advantage, or the server gets hold of an IT code used to program the POS system and is using that for authorizations. (Sounds crazy, but we’ve seen it happen!)
- How to uncover it: Regularly review the list of employees able to authorize a promotion through the POS system, which will ensure that nobody is using a manager key from someone who no longer works at the restaurant, and you’ll be able to see if there is an IT code being used where it shouldn’t be. If there are promotions that are only valid during certain time periods, like happy hour, manually audit checks to see if they are occurring at different times and without authorization.
Don’t have time for all that manual work? Avero Loss Prevention can do it automatically, helping you improve your restaurant profits. Learn more and get started today, and check out other common restaurant fraud scams:
- Item Transfer scam
- Check Reuse scam
- Transfer scam
- Cash Coupon abuse
- VIP Comp scam
- Tip Inflation scam
- Automatic Gratuity scam
