Womble Employment Law Blog

A new North Carolina law provides an additional avenue for employers to seek redress from employees who have taken company information for personal use.   N.C.G.S. § 99A-2, which became effective January 1, 2016, provides that “Any person who intentionally gains access to the nonpublic areas of another’s premises and engages in an act that exceeds the person’s authority to enter those areas is liable to the owner or operator of the premises for any damages sustained.”  N.C.G.S. § 99A-2(a).  The statute lists several examples of acts that exceed a person’s authority, and first among those examples is an employee who takes company information for use beyond the scope of his or her employment: An employee who enters the nonpublic areas of an employer's premises for a reason other than a bona fide intent of seeking or holding employment or doing business with the employer and thereafter without authorization captures or removes the employer's data, paper, recor...

This week, a former airline employee is to be sentenced for his part in a 14-year scheme that defrauded Delta Air Lines, and its predecessor, Northwest Airlines, out of $36 Million. An FBI investigation revealed that a long-time employee of Northwest and Delta conspired with another person to obtain payment from the airline by submitting invoices for services that were never provided. According to published reports, Paul Anderson was a company manager who had worked for Northwest then Delta since 1979. Michael Yedor was not an employee of the airline, but owned a company called Airborne Voice and Data. The two came up with a plan to defraud the airline, which they carried out between 1999 and 2013. The scheme, which the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case in Atlanta called “astounding,” worked like this: In order to receive payment for the false invoices, Yedor sent the invoices to Anderson, who had the authority to approve them for payment. Once Anderson approved the invoices,...