What percent of employees are responsible for what percent of theft?

• A. 5% of the employees are responsible for 95% of the theft.
• B. 50% of the employees are responsible for 50% of the theft.
• C. 20% of the employees are responsible for 60% of the theft.
• D. 95% of the employees are responsible for 5% of the theft.

Answer: (A)

The concept tested is how theft incidents tend to be distributed among employees. In insider theft patterns, a small group is responsible for the vast majority of losses—the idea captured by the Pareto principle. The best answer states that a small percentage of employees (5%) account for most of the theft (95%). This reflects the typical concentration of risk and explains why security programs focus on monitoring, controls, and audits for high-risk individuals, privileged roles, or high-value areas rather than applying the same measures uniformly to everyone.

Why the other options don’t fit: a 50%/50% split suggests theft is evenly spread across all employees, which isn’t supported by insider-theft patterns and would waste resources on broad, less effective controls. A 20%/60% split is closer but still not the extreme concentration seen in practice. A 95%/5% split would imply nearly all employees are responsible for a small share, which undermines the emphasis on targeting the high-risk minority and is not the commonly cited distribution used for risk prioritization.