For the 11-year period 2001 to 2012, Australian workers stole a total of $398 million from businesses through employee fraud, a study by forensic accounting firm Warfield and Associates found.

The report identified the banking sector as the most vulnerable to employee fraud, and accountants and bookkeepers are the worst offenders, disclosed forensic accountant Brett Warfield.

He attributed the vulnerability of banks and these two positions to their access to money and a lot of trust given to them. In many cases, the fraud was committed with the employee merely sending the money to their own bank accounts via electronic fund transfer.

Of the 89 cases studied by the forensic accounting firm, some of the amounts involved were very large. Mr Warfield cited a woman employee who filched $45.3 million from her employer to fund a high-living lifestyle. Four other employees stole $27.3 million, $22.4 million, $19.3 million and $19 million from the companies where they workers.

Two-thirds or 66 of the 93 perpetrators were males and 27 were females.

In 50 per cent of the cases, the stealing was done due to the gambling addiction of the employee.

Mr Warfield said the report is an indicator of governance weaknesses among some of Australia's largest companies and organisations.

"This research is used as a warning sign to other organisations, so that they can learn from the mistakes of others, making sure that there's effective internal controls and supervision of people and regular audits to get in and ask the hard question and hopefully improve the governance of their organisations," ABC quoted Mr Warfield.

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