Benefits subplot: Workplace Crime Ghost Employees
One of the subplots in Benefits concerns (the main character) Ben’s worry that there’s a “ghost employee” at his place of employment. “Refuge” is an outpost of an imaginary boutique office furniture chain. I named the ghost employee Mehrdad, after a sexy Persian guy I knew back in the 1980s. He wasn’t a criminal of any kind, I just liked the name and somewhat exotic background.
Workplace crime ghost employees are fictitious person(s) put on the company’s books and the official payroll. Their compensation checks are diverted an account controlled by the person behind the scam, whether it’s the suspect branch manager (as in this case) or another executive.
Famous “Ghost Employee” Examples
In this way, it’s a variation on the classic scam of using a false identity as a way to steal. It can be actual cash, as here, or an identity, as in concocting a fake ID for someone who died as an infant. Sometimes it involves using real individuals’ names and identities to mask an enormous land scam (as in the movie “Chinatown.)” In that film, elderly residents of a 30s nursing home were used as pawns in such a venture.
Here’s a definition from the Internet:
Fraud Magazine Article
which goes into more detail about how workplace crime ghost employees are set up and used. It also lists the four essential factors bad actors must have to perpetrate a successful ghost employee scam. One often reads about these scams in the back pages of newspapers. They’re quite common – but at least anecdotally, they don’t seem to last very long!