Employee Surveillance by Detectives in Stuttgart

Every employer naturally expects loyalty and identification of their employees with the company that employs them – but this expectation is not always fulfilled. No matter the industry, in every business with a large workforce, offences committed by employees against company property and interests occur. These include theft, deliberate damage to property and the unauthorised disclosure of company secrets, even information about new technical developments.

Whatever the suspicions may be, the corporate investigators of Kurtz Detective Agency Stuttgart are experienced observers and true experts in the field of employee surveillance to safeguard your legitimate interests: +49 711 7153 0028.

Detectives initially incur costs but ultimately reduce expenses by uncovering internal offenders

The employment of detectives to monitor employees naturally incurs initial fee costs. In the long term, however, these expenses prove highly efficient in most cases and result in significant cost savings.

A key determining factor here is your corporate policy: Should the monitoring measures remain confidential, or should the workforce be informed? In the latter case, you can be sure that your employees will henceforth be aware of the limits. Anyone found guilty of fraudulent or otherwise illegal activities against the company will be identified and penalised – a fact made clear to the entire workforce. In most cases where our Stuttgart-based corporate investigators conduct inquiries, successful evidence of employee misconduct justifies immediate dismissal. Such an incident serves as a warning to the staff that, as an employer, you will not tolerate abuse. Furthermore, exposing a habitual malingerer can even boost morale among colleagues, since such individuals often disrupt workflows and burden co-workers with additional tasks.

Case study: Effects of sick leave fraud

In small and medium-sized enterprises, the absence of even a single employee can have serious repercussions. One client of Kurtz Detective Agency Stuttgart, based in Esslingen am Neckar, told us how his desk gradually piled up with unfinished files, and how his staff complained of overload and poor working conditions – to put it bluntly: morale was low.

Loss of turnover due to shirkers

Client appointments could not be kept, and promised work was not completed on time. Several clients withdrew their interest or even cancelled already confirmed orders. After discussing the matter with several of his twelve employees, our client discovered that his personnel manager had been reporting sick repeatedly for several months. The client had been unaware of this, as it was the very same personnel manager’s responsibility to handle reorganisation and redistribution of work during absences due to illness. The employees also told our client that the personnel manager often boasted about how much he enjoyed building and designing his new home himself, only hiring professionals for specialised tasks. The client wondered how, alongside his full-time job, the personnel manager found the time to build a house on his own. Annoyed that he had not been informed about the absence, he contacted our Stuttgart detectives to verify whether the personnel manager was indeed unfit for work.

The employer pays to protect personal interests

It will likely not surprise that our corporate investigators observed the personnel manager leaving his flat punctually at 06:00 every morning, driving to his building site and diligently working on his new home. Through the court-admissible documentation of these activities, our client obtained proof of the personnel manager’s sick leave fraud and dismissed him without notice.

Kurtz Detective Agency Stuttgart also recommended that he consult our partner law firm, Klünder & Nann, to assess potential claims for damages against the personnel manager, since his absence had led to order cancellations and financial losses. As there was a possibility that the court might assign partial liability to our client for failing to monitor the fraudulent employee’s work and to arrange adequate cover, the parties eventually settled out of court, with the offender agreeing to bear only the detective costs.

This amicable settlement was partly due to our client’s urgent need to find a replacement personnel manager and his statement that he lacked the time and energy to pursue legal proceedings against his former employee.