>>>After leaving the corporate world, one of the first projects I undertook was inventorying replacement appliances at a huge apartment complex in NYC. One inventory system after another had failed.
>>>I was told that the people who would be using the system were building superintendents.
>>>I was also told that the purpose of the system was to reduce theft of appliances by building superintendents.
>>>decided to pass on that project.
>
>Seems to me a lot of industries have stock control/inventory systems used by the most likely thieves of product. Is this just another example that you can't expect what you don't inspect? Meaning unless the superintendent/store manager/warehouse supervisor knows there will be regular audit and full reckoning, there's no consequence to rorting any system? I'm not trying to tell you how your experience works, just wondering whether you could have played the genius by introducing the concept of regular stocktake!

That's near impossible to prevent. For a while, in the thinnest years here (late nineties), there were people who were fixing washing machines by replacing parts which weren't broken (along with the minor fix which was the cause) and then taking the replaced part with them and selling it again to the next mark. Because with the price they could extract for what they really fixed they couldn't make enough to survive. And partly because they'd get enough parts to rebuild a clunker into something they could sell.

Now imagine taking inventory of all the appliances in an apartment building. The ones in use are in tennants' private space, you can't just barge in every month and take down serial numbers of each fridge, washer, stove. And the ones gone could well be covered by "broken beyond repair" or "repair costs more than remaining value of it"... and then those scraped would end, quite legally, on someone's junkyard where they'd be fixed using parts from the mechanism I just described. It's one of those cases where investigation cost is larger than the damage. What to do then?