Small businesses owners can be more vulnerable to identity theft with an average organization losing more than $9 a day per employee to identity fraud and abuse.

That was a lesson I was reminded of Sunday when talking with my uncle, James Linton, who is a mortgage broker in Louisville.

The message of identity theft really hit home when he told me that an employee of his had assumed his identity, and over the course of four months, had stolen $13,000.

I almost fell out of my seat when he told me that – mainly because my uncle still had an upbeat and positive attitude over the phone. Amazing.

The employee had access to his personal information and had racked up thousands in debt in multiple credit card lines, cell phones and utility accounts.

It wasn’t until my uncle decided he was going to get the mail for the business one day – on a hunch – that he discovered the bills and later confronted that employee.

Not surprisingly, the employee had a history of preying on identities, my uncle told me.

I still just shake my head in amazement at how some people in this world have this magical sense of entitlement that leads them to victimize good, hard-working people, like my uncle.

I’ve seen my uncle practically give his shirt off his back to people through fundraisers at the coffeehouse on 18th and Muhammad Ali in Louisville and other acts of goodness.

How can you go on helping people and being a positive person in a community when something so awful has been done, I asked him.

“I don’t know, I guess it has to be in your heart,” he said.

But what happened to him reminds me of when I spoke with Dennis Dycus, director of the state of Tennessee’s Comptroller of the Treasury in the Division of Municipal Audit, last year.

Dycus said that many people think that buying something over the Internet poses a high risk, but he said that it’s where your personal information is being stored that should raise concerns.

Companies with 100 or fewer employees, like my uncle’s mortgage brokerage, are more vulnerable to abuse and fraud, with the median loss at $190,000 per scheme in 2006, mostly involving employees “fraudulently writing company checks, skimming revenues and processing fraudulent invoices,” according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ Report to the Nation on Occupational Fraud and Abuse.

“As long as you get people and money together, there will be fraud,” Dycus said. “It’s not a question of if, it’s when.”

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners says that small businesses are less likely to have internal controls or consistent audits. As a result, the average mom and pop shop is a magnet for thieves. Dycus recommended businesses always check employee references, including checking beginning and ending dates of employment, as well as examining bank statements, having a written code of ethics and setting the tone by setting an environment where the consequences of fraud are clearly known.

Even if you don’t own a business, I hope you can learn something from my uncle’s unfortunate situation and take heed: Identity theft is a very real problem in this country, affecting millions each year.

— For more on identity theft and what you can do if you think you’ve been a victim of it, visit the U.S. Department of Justice’s Web site at http://www.usdoj.gov/ criminal/fraud/websites/idtheft.html.