Downloading: the new work theft 

Until now, stealing from the company usually involved the odd piece of stationery or personal photocopying.

But a conviction for downloading on the company computer has highlighted a new type of employment theft.

Downloading files on the company computer might seem as innocent as swiping a company pen, but it can cost employers big bucks. When it happened to a new Whangarei business they called the police.

Daniel Davies was a trusted employee, but his music video and pornography downloading blew out Poster Faktory's internet bill. He was found guilty of theft.
 
"Dan had asked for permission to download a few music files, which we didn't have a problem with," says Yvonne Clapperton of Poster Faktory. "But we came in here one weekend and he had a huge stack of CDs."

Clapperton says uncovering the offence was a surprise.

"We were absolutely gutted. Dan had been a friend of ours. He'd been unemployed and we'd given him a job. We trusted him implicitly."

Many companies have policies in place to avoid the expense of excessive downloading.
 
"You're paying international bandwidth, national bandwidth, and your company may have a traffic cap, you're only allowed so much traffic a month and you pay extra if you go over that limit. That is quite an expensive process," says Paul Brislen of Computerworld.

Phil O'Reilly of Business New Zealand says the Poster Faktory case puts put the spotlight on employee theft of bandwidth or computer time. He says it is as much an expense to a company as theft of photocopy paper or theft of pens.

Allan Watt from Computer Forensic Investigations told Close Up there has recently been a big increase in employers abusing company computers, predominantly in intellectual property theft.

"Employees downloading client databases and information and either putting them into memory sticks, technical drawing sheets...then they leave and go and work for the opposition or set themselves up," Watt says.

He says the problem with computers is that it is hard to tell what people are doing on them until you get an expert to assess what is in the cyberspace or on the hard drive.

Employment lawyer Michael Smyth specialises in working with small businesses. He agrees with Watt and says the difficulty employers face is that their workers are becoming more and more tech savvy.

"For example you could have an employee sitting at his desktop, when in actual fact he's not working on the employment server, but he's working remotely on a server, maybe sitting at his home."

Smyth says his advice to employers would be to have a policy in place, which sets out what is reasonable and what is not.

So while it may be tempting that latest download might not be worth your job.