Missing stock or leaked files: Chandler workplace investigations

Chandler warehouse inventory and laptop, a business looking into employee theft or data leaks

Chandler's economy leans hard on technology and manufacturing. The city's economic development office points to semiconductor and electronics manufacturing as a major industry, with Intel's Ocotillo campus at the center of it and a crowd of suppliers, engineering firms and distributors around it. That makes the city a place where the thing a business would least like to lose is often information: designs, process notes, customer lists, pricing.

So when something goes wrong inside a Chandler company, it is as likely to be a file walking out the door as a pallet of stock. Both are worth taking seriously, and both are easy to mishandle.

Common situations

Inventory or tools disappear from a warehouse or job site, and the counts never match.
A salesperson resigns and, within weeks, your biggest customer moves to a competitor they have just joined.
An engineer downloads a large volume of files the week before giving notice.
Expense reports, refunds or vendor payments look off, and only one person had the access.
Someone is working a side business with your equipment or on your time.

The law, briefly

Arizona has a version of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, starting at A.R.S. 44-401. It defines misappropriation and "improper means," which includes theft, bribery, misrepresentation, breach of a duty to keep something secret, and espionage through electronic or other means. Whether your information is a "trade secret" depends partly on whether you took reasonable steps to keep it secret, which is one reason lawyers ask early about NDAs, access controls and policies.

Federal law can apply too. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. 1030) addresses unauthorized access to computers, and theft of physical goods is plain theft under state criminal law.

None of that tells you what happened. That is the job of the investigation.

What a private investigator does in these cases

Arizona licenses private investigators through the Department of Public Safety, and the state's definition of their work includes investigating losses, the conduct and associations of people, and gathering evidence for court. In an internal case, that often looks like this.

Interviews

Talking to employees, supervisors and sometimes former employees, in a structured way that is documented and fair. Done well, interviews often resolve a case on their own.

Records review

Matching inventory logs, access badge records, shipping documents and invoices against each other. Patterns show up quickly when someone looks with fresh eyes.

Background and affiliations

Checking whether the employee has a side company, a relationship with a vendor, or a new employer they have not mentioned. Business filings and court records are public.

Surveillance

Where it is justified, documenting activity in public places, such as a former employee meeting customers or selling equipment online.

Coordinating digital forensics

Forensic examination of laptops, phones and cloud accounts is specialist work. Many private investigators work alongside forensic examiners, and the chain of custody matters if the case goes to court.

Mistakes to avoid

The first instinct in these situations is to grab the employee's laptop, read their personal email and confront them. Slow down.

Do not access an employee's personal accounts, even if the password is saved on a company machine. That can create exposure under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and similar laws, and it can taint evidence.

Do not secretly record conversations you are not part of. Arizona allows recording with the consent of one party (A.R.S. 13-3012), but intercepting a conversation without any party's consent is a felony under A.R.S. 13-3005. Company monitoring policies can change what is allowed on company systems, so ask a lawyer before anyone starts monitoring.

Do not wipe or reissue the device. If someone may have taken data, the laptop they returned is evidence. Put it somewhere safe, untouched.

Do not accuse anyone publicly. Defamation claims and wrongful termination claims are easier to win when the employer made accusations it could not back up.

Who to call first

For a trade secret or data case, the usual order is an employment or business litigation lawyer first, who then retains the private investigator and any forensic examiner. That structure can help protect the work as part of preparing for litigation. For a simple inventory loss where you are not yet thinking about court, a private investigator can often start directly, but brief your lawyer anyway.

What to have ready

a timeline of what you noticed and when
names of people with access
relevant policies, NDAs and employment agreements
any devices, kept untouched
your goal: recovery, a termination decision, a police report, or a lawsuit

You can find private investigators in Chandler and in the wider East Valley. Every private investigator listed in Arizona on Served & Found is a member of the Arizona Association of Licensed Private Investigators (AALPI). Our guide to what a private investigator does covers the legal limits generally. If the problem is screening people before they join, see our note on pre-hire background checks in Chandler. For more on the city, see the Chandler page.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you think data left the building this week, the most useful thing you can do today is lock down the devices and call a lawyer.

See the board: everyone in Chandler.