While I was thinking that, this particular product that he took came from packaging that had water damage. We couldn't even shoot the bar code to log its location into a damaged tote, and it came from an empty container with no inventory tracking attached to it. It was a random item thrown into a random tote and we had to make a home for it, but had no means to do so.

That is what gave him the justification to take it. He believed it was just going to get tossed in the garbage since there was no means to identify the product. And who knows how far back in the inbound process that item was damaged. My FC is very sloppy with its inventory management. We have empty totes floating around all over the place with virtual inventory inside of them and virtually empty totes that are loaded to the brim with product... ugh what a mess.