Take the Money and Run: White Collar Crime at DHR Patio Homes, LLC (CASE Notes) (Case Study‪)‬

CASE DESCRIPTION This is a field-based disguised case which describes how a small family business deals with crimes committed by a trusted employee. The problem for the characters in question is how to deal with their most trusted employee, someone they treated like a family member, who they discovered had stolen nearly $25,000 from them over a two year period. Several factors complicate the owners' decision as to how to proceed: the person in question was their most tenured employee and had become part of the family, the employee and his family were renting a house built by the protagonists for the employee until the employee could establish his own credit, and the employee's brother worked for the firm. The case has a difficulty level appropriate for a sophomore or junior level course in business ethics or small business management. The case is designed to be taught in one class period (may vary from fifty to one hundred minutes depending upon the course structure and the instructional approach employed, see instructor's note) and is expected to require between four to eight hours of outside preparation by students (again, depending upon instructor's choice of class preparation method).