URGENT!!!! Need to Recover deleted records from a table

[Chucklez]

The company I work for was just contracted by a medical office to recover deleted files from a Microsoft Access Table. The know an employee was stealing from them, but are unable to prove it at this point.

What the employee would do is create a bill for a patient, then process the bill thru the insurance carrier, or person. Once payment was received, the employee would delete the bill from the system, and pocket the money.

It is my job to show proof.

How can I recover the files from the table? I have a copy of the data here.

This is urgent so thanks for the help or any ideas you can give me.

-Chuck

 

[mikey69]

I don't think you can recover deleted records. All you could perhaps do is show by inference that records have been deleted, provided they have an autonumber key field.

 

[Chucklez]

These tables do have an autonumber field, but I really dont beleive that will hold up in court. I am not a lawyer tho, so I may be wrong.

Thanks for your help anyways.

 

[melburstein]

Does the company do backups of their data files? If so, you could recover a copy of the database from an earlier date.

 

[TonyU]

hmmmm

[tt]
[sup]"The only ideas that will work for you are the ones you put to work."[/sup]
[/tt]

​

 

[Chucklez]

unfortunately, the client did not begin to do backups until they began to suspect this employee. Ive looked at a couple of backups, and still havent found a way to recover the data.

There are glaring gaps in the autonumber fields in the files in question, so I know some where deleted.

I have summed the accumulated to date amounts of the customer, then summed the actually payment file. These two numbers should match, but there is almost a $80,000 difference in the two. Thats alot of money over 3-4 years time.

Another thing that makes this difficult is that some of the bills were intentionally deleted. These bills are OK. But the vast number of bills that were deleted are probably the result of this employee stealing.

I have tried to export in several different formats, and used a foxpro, dbase IV, and several other datafile utilities and still cannot locate the deleted files. Ive also looked at the Microsoft site to see if they have any suggestions and they dont. go figure.

Im begining to think the employee may have compacted/repaired the database after doing this to try to hide her tracks.

Thanks for the info guys/gals and if any other ideas come up, please forward them.

-Chuck

p

 

[CJTyo]

Make it easier on yourself and get copies of payments from the insurance carriers paid to your client and compare against deposits by date to find discrepancies. Then the insurance carriers can get copies of the canceled checks and see who endorsed them.

C
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Insanity is a matter of Perception.

 

[Geraldo]

chucklez, i read your threads and i think you can help me with my problem:
I need to link Visual FoxPro Tables to Access and i can´t do it right, maybe with ODBC but i can´t make it work.
Any Ideas are good.

Thanks in advance

Geraldo

 

[LittleSmudge]

When you do finally get this all sorted out chucklez - make it very clear to the client that the root cause of their problem is the poor initial design of the database.

The user should never have been allowed access to deleting commercial records from the database at any time - unwanted records should be flaggged for exclusion from listings rather than 'deleting' and users should not be given access to things like raw tables or any button that could cause a record to be deleted.

G LS

 

[CDN]

Sorry, but I personally don't buy it

" The company I work for was just contracted by a medical office to recover deleted files from a Microsoft Access Table. The know an employee was stealing from them, but are unable to prove it at this point."

1. First of all, this employee must have been the accountant and the database designer at the same time to gain access to raw data.

2. I don't (and I've been programming databases for 10 years now) of any medical software provider that allows DELETES in a database thru their interface, sorry but that is not how it's done.

3. Anf finally, if it is your job to "show proof", and you don't know that deleted records from a database can not be recovered, why did the contracting give the job to you and not a database expert to assess the damage and issue a report of his\her findings?

Sorry, don't buy it.
Something smells too fishy around this post.

Only my opinion.