PDF Version - Glidewell Dental Labs

Dr. Michael DiTolla: For those of our readers who haven’t had
the opportunity to see your lecture on dental-practice fraud yet,
can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you
got involved in dental embezzlement investigation?
David Harris: I’ve been investigating dental embezzlement
for about 22 years. Before that I did various things. I was
in the Army for a while; I did investigation for a bank. After
retiring from working for the bank, I was sitting at home
not doing a whole lot when I got a call from a friend of
mine who happened to be a dentist. He said, “I think my
front-desk person is stealing from me, and you’re the only
guy who I can think of to turn to on this.” So I went to his
office that night, we found the fraudulent employee and we
got rid of her. I went back to watching TV and really didn’t
give it another thought.
It was a coincidence when about three weeks later I went to
my own dentist for a hygiene appointment and saw through
the glass of the office door the same person who we had
terminated from the other office three weeks earlier! So I
ran away quickly hoping that she didn’t see me, went to
the nearest pay phone — this story pre-dates me having
a cell phone in my pocket — and phoned the dentist. I
got put through to him on some pretext and I said, “I’m
not coming in for my appointment today, but when I tell
you why you’ll probably forgive me.” I told him about the
time bomb he had sitting at the front desk, and he asked
me what he should do next. Halfway through my second
sentence he hired me. Things have changed a lot since then
in a whole bunch of ways. I was doing this on my own then,
and now I have a decent-sized company that helps me with
investigations, but the basics haven’t changed.
MD: That’s an amazing story. In terms of dentistry, I guess it’s
not that surprising in the sense that in most of our communities,
and even nationally, dentistry is a very tight-knit group where
you know and see a lot of the same people. Even in corporate
dentistry, with the dental product manufacturers, you’ll see
somebody leave one company and then a new CEO gets hired
at another company. It seems like the same people are shifting
slots and moving around. So I guess it’s not shocking that
somebody who gets fired from one dental office job turns up at
another dental office.
DH: It’s what they know. In the case of this particular
woman, it was lucrative because she was getting paid her
official salary and then her, shall we say, “unofficial” salary.
MD: It’s not like when she got fired from the first practice
that there was a scarlet letter put on her forehead to identify
her as an embezzler on any interview she might go on after
that, right?
DH: Thieves are pretty good at doctoring their résumés
enough to hide their backgrounds. One of the most common
lines is simply telling the new employer that they’re still
working at the previous place and saying, “My old employer
doesn’t know I’m leaving, so please don’t call him.”
MD: That’s an interesting line. I get the feeling that we’re going
to hear about some slightly ingenious — albeit evil — things
like that today. I guess these people have figured out how best to
cover their tracks.
DH: Thieves are pretty clever. One of the most interesting
parts of my job is witnessing the sheer creativity that some
of these folks show. I will now have to disappoint your
readers a little bit because our policy in an uncontrolled
forum like this one is not to talk specifics. My recurrent
nightmare is to turn thieves into better thieves. We do talk
about specifics in closed seminars, but in this interview,
I feel a little bit constrained. Some of the stuff we see is
almost spectacular in its ingenuity. You can’t help thinking
“
The serial embezzlers ... cater to what I sometimes call the ‘wet-fingered fantasy’
some dentists have. A fantasy where they get into their office every
morning, do high-quality dentistry on a relatively small number
of patients and then go home, without having to
get dragged into the messiness of
managing their practice.
”