Employee theft has become an epidemic for U.S. small businesses. According to an article in Security: Solutions for Enterprise Security Leaders (2017), employee theft averaged $1.13 million in business losses in 2016 alone. 68% of these victims were small to midsized businesses. It is estimated that 50% of small business first-year failures can be connected to employee theft. The most common type of employee crimes is embezzlement. This misappropriation of assets is when an employee steals from their employer. In many cases, this individual is a trusted employee who was given responsibility by the company to oversee these assets, which created the opportunity for the crime (Lindquist & Goldberg, 2009). Businesses must learn to protect themselves from employee crime before it negatively affects their cash flows. The following assessment of the Morris Pizza Restaurant and how they dealt with embezzlement within their own store will be used as a way to demonstrate the importance of being proactive in implementing company employee theft controls.