Businesses, banks, government entities and institutions of all kinds, find it difficult to deal with employees who are dirty dealing. This could be a trader who is doing inside trading, a government employee who is handing our contracts to their buddies, an employee in a business that is giving company secrets to a rival business for a bag of money under the table. What do you do with them?

It’s easy to say, just fire them. Of course you should, but there is more than it to this. For one thing, you may want to take this employee or rather former employee to court. They might have other secrets that they could spill and since the confidentiality agreement in their contract wasn’t enough to stop them, something more serious might be needed. Here are your options for dealing with a delinquent employee doing dirty dealing.

Find Out What They Know First

Don’t just fire an employee who has been caught giving away company secrets or handing our contracts your business will adhere to, to their friends. One thing you can do is to first, find out how much they know about the weaknesses of your system. Many times, criminals tell the police how they broke into something, maybe a bank, a security system or a public website. For this information, they can get a lesser sentence because they help the very entity they just wronged to protect itself better.

This is what you should be doing. Try to find out where the loopholes in your business are, by asking them questions about how they did it. Maybe your contract awarding system doesn’t have enough checks and balances. Maybe you have put too much power into one role and you need to split or share the responsibilities. You can ask them to give you information and if they won’t because they know they will be terminated, you can offer them a lesser punishment, such as being demoted, given paid leave for a couple months in which they can find other employment etc. don’t waste this opportunity to learn how you could prevent this from happening again.

Investigate the Assumptions

Now that you have caught the employee, they have confessed to some wrongdoings, put their admission to the test. You could entrap the person or business they are dirty dealing with and thus, bolster your own internal credibility. One day, this will all come out in the courts or in the media, so it’s best to make your actions and position fully the opposite of dirty dealing.

So, investigate the assumptions you have. Record everything from phone calls, text messages, emails and written pieces of information regarding those that are involved. Get into contact with your lawyer and let them know what you are doing, ask for advice and follow their instructions so you keep within the law. Obviously, you want to stop any further wrongful acts but if you can string them along, getting them to admit to their plans and acts, this bodes well for your fightback in court against them.

Sooner or later you will need to stop this from going on, but not until you get enough evidence to show that you were not involved i.e. it was not your commands or policy to do this sort of thing. It staves off the guilty employee from saying you said it was okay or that you wanted them to do it, etc.

Government Employee in the Mix

It’s very easy to take someone to court, if they are an employee of another business. It’s pretty common to see a high-level executive of one business, coercing the employee of another business and being taken to court over it. Dirty dealing in businesses is pretty common unfortunately. But what happens when the person that was in cahoots with your employee, works for the government? Better yet, what if they work for a very sensitive institution, such as the FBI, IRS or State Department?

Now you need to file something which is called a tort claim. These tort claims are simple to understand. A “tort” is considered a civil wrong, like when a person ignores a stop sign and causes an injury. So obviously, the government employee who was dirty dealing with someone in your business, didn’t obey the law, and didn’t stop at any point while they were causing your business injury. So, this is why you need to take them to court, with this kind of claim. This is of course subject to personal injury, so you also need to prove that their actions harmed an employee, either financially, emotionally or physically. Which shouldn’t be hard to do.

Sending a Message

Make it public. We know it’s going to be hard to do this but you should speak with the media and let them know what has happened. Far better to hear from them than to get an anonymous tip-off about your business and the employee, then hear it on the news one evening.

Just be honest and be specific. Let them know that the employee has been terminated, you are taking those involved to court, you are sorry for the damage caused to customers (if at all) and you will do better in future by either revising policies or just being more diligent. It’s something that takes guts to do, in public, but you have to just admit where you got it wrong and why something like this happened.

You also send a message to anyone in the company thinking of doing something similar. You will drop them like a hot piece of coal, go public immediately and use them as an example to bolster your own integrity and brand name.

It’s always painful to find out an employee has taken advantage of your business and done some shady and illegal acts. But don’t panic, gather evidence, bolster your position and when the time is right, strike.