When Elliott Allan Hilsinger launched his Identity Theft business in June 2012, the goal was to help Americans fight identity theft and its impacts on multiple levels while also providing the protective tools to help prevent identity theft from occurring in the future.
For companies ready to expand employee benefits options, investing in identity theft protection makes good sense for the individual worker as well as the bottom line of the business.
Lost productivity
When an employee is a victim of identity theft, the impact often stretches beyond personal accounts. When an employee is not utilizing best practices and protective measures at home and in the office, there can often be an overlap of passwords, security questions, and more, making it easy for hackers to breach their personal data and company information.
If the impacts of identity theft stretch into the workplace, a worker must utilize traditional work time to help mitigate any effects. According to Elliott Allan Hilsinger, identity theft resolution can take 165 hours or more, and most victims never fully recover. When a company must compensate workers for that time and sacrifice progress on essential projects, the costs expand exponentially and could largely be avoided with simple proactive measures.
Reduces stress
In addition to the time identity theft issues take to mitigate, they bring a lot of stress. An employee may worry for weeks or months in the immediate aftermath about any future repercussions. After the initial stress settles, opening new accounts, forgetting a password, receiving credit alerts, and other standard actions can trigger additional concerns. Even when these do not directly impact work, stress limits concentration and can lead to distraction, impeded performance, and personality changes in the victim. By providing identity theft protection as an employee benefit, workers can avoid identity theft in many instances and enjoy greater confidence when an issue needs to be addressed.
Helps prevent privacy breaches at work
Whether the identity theft requires simply resetting company passwords or extends further to wiping computers, creating new company log-ins, or notifying customers, the actions take away from the regularly planned work activities of the employee while putting demands on other resources, such as a tech department. By implementing proactive identity theft measures, employees learn best practices and enjoy access to tools to help prevent identity theft and limit the impact of future breaches, Elliott Hilsinger advises.
In instances where identity theft could lead to sharing personal information about other employees or clients, the investment in this employee benefit pays off big time as mitigation measures are more costly and cannot undue any reputation damage suffered following a breach.