Retirement or Departure from Workforce

The subject departs the organization due to permanent withdrawal from the workforce (commonly through retirement, long-term medical leave, or other non-return scenarios). These exits are typically low-conflict and pre-announced, leading many organizations to deprioritize insider threat risk during the transition. However, this assumption can obscure several operational realities.

Retiring subjects (particularly long-tenured employees) often retain extensive institutional knowledge, broad access privileges, and deep familiarity with unmonitored systems or legacy processes. Emotional drivers such as nostalgia, ownership over work product, or a desire to “preserve” professional contributions may lead to data exfiltration, sometimes unconcealed or rationalized as harmless.

These behaviors are not necessarily malicious, but they still represent infringements, particularly when proprietary data, customer records, or sensitive infrastructure documentation is copied to personal devices or cloud accounts. Investigators should be attentive to the informal norms that often surround retirements, which may suppress scrutiny or allow boundary-stretching.