Employees Biggest Threat to Corporate Secrets

Palisade Systems, of Ames Iowa has just conducted an audit of recent data theft cases. Palisade concluded that over 65% of corporate data theft cases were attributable to the companies' own employees. Either through theft or mistake, these employees caused the loss of more corporate proprietary information than competitors, thieves and hackers combined. Patent applications, research and development activities, trademarks, trade secrets and other sensitive corporate data are all at risk from accidental or intentional acts of employees.

Rush Nigut of West Des Moines, Iowa law firm Sullivan & Ward, P.C. has been following the trend in his blog and has some simple solutions to reducing the impact of this very costly threat. Rush recommends a human resource audit, the outline for which is available free on his website.

The outline details the following steps for determining whether your company is at risk for either accidental or intentional theft of data by your employees:

1) Employee application and interview documents;
2) Personnel files;
3) Employee handbook;
4) Employee performance evaluations;
5) Employee discipline;
6) Employee job descriptions;
7) Safety policies and operating procedures;
8) Pay practices;
9) Benefit policies;
10) Required postings;
11) Board policies (if applicable);
12) Union contract (if applicable);
13) Employee Termination;
14) Employee exit interviews;
15) Employee privacy issues.

Most importantly, the audit details the necessity of having appropriate termination procedures in place, including employee handbooks and exit interviews, before a termination becomes necessary. Well crafted termination procedures are probably the simplest and least costly way to prevent disgruntled employees from causing malicious damage to your company's invaluable data. For more information, contact Rush.


Brett Trout

Other Related Topics:
Employment Law, Human Resources, Human Resource Audit, Corporate Law, Corporate Lawyer