Woman ordered to repay employer after software shows ‘time theft’ | Hacker News Reader

Woman ordered to repay employer after software shows ‘time theft’

theguardian.com

44 pointsuxhacker33 comments

https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...

Considering that your average employee in the US (and it’s safe to assume that numbers in Canada are similar) is productive for less than 3 hours in your average 8 hour work day, this is kind of ridiculous. If you’re paying a consultant, sure you want to get an hour work for an hour pay but an employee?

Reach CPA can consider this a win short term but I anticipate they’ll be out of business in 3 years or less. They’ll lose employees and nobody is going to apply to replace them. Seems like a stupidly small amount of money to alienate your present and future workforce over to me.

Edit: not to mention that this is a cowardly and badly broken way to “manage” employees. An effective manager would have actually managed her and counseled her on what the company expected. Instead they went the chicken shit route of management, didn’t work with her and instead used tech to look for excuses to fire her. This company needs to go down in flames. If you can’t be bothered to manage your employees, you shouldn’t be in business. Period.

You can read the tribunal decision here [1]

What should Reach have done? They fronted her money to set up a WFH office. They were paying her professional fees.

After five months, when her productivity was lower than expected, they began having weekly discussions about productivity. They installed TimeCamp, with her knowledge.

But... then, even when she presumably knew she was being monitored--she falsified her time sheets. In her words: "Clearly, it’s, I’ve plugged hours that I shouldn’t have plugged to files um when I wasn’t working on them and like, I can’t hide that"

She's a white-collar employee in the finance industry. If you can't trust her, you can't keep her.

Ultimately, they fired her.

They would have probably let it go there. But then _she_ sued them for $5,000 in wrongful termination claims. That's... pretty brazen!

[1]: https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/5230...

Bullshit. As a consultant, if I'm productive for 3 hours in an 8 hour day, I charge 3 hours, maybe a little more if it was due to context switching. According to this article, this woman admitted to falsifying hours and the repayment was in part due to the frivolous lawsuit she brought after being fired for falsifying timesheets, which is literally criminal fraud. She got off way, way easy. The "tracking software" sounds dangerous and stupid but in this case it sounds like it got one right.

From my post: "If you’re paying a consultant, sure you want to get an hour work for an hour pay but an employee?"

It seems like we agree on the consulting bit but she wasn’t a consultant, she was an employee. Expecting 8 hours of work from an employee in an 8 hour day isn’t the way things work.

If your job requires reporting hours you work, you have to report those hours accurately. This doesn't seem to be "got distracted by the internet for 30-40 minutes a day" but rather it's long term consistent non-work - something she actually admits (she explicitly said she recorded hours she knew she should not have been)

In some other cases there can be a transitive issue: plenty of companies/industries bill by the hour, so need to be able to track how many hours each employee has worked on each job. One of those employees over-reporting hours worked would presumably open the employer to legal action for over charging. Accounting is one of those industries.

So in those cases it's not necessarily a matter she reported X hours, she gets paid X*$Y. Just that the accurate recording of hours is important for other legal reasons.

It said she was an accountant, so I don't know, but I assumed most people who fill out timesheets are employees of consulting companies. This is not some niche, this is millions or tens of millions of Americans (I know she's Canadian but it's very similar there). We don't make "independent consultant" money, we just make regular employee money, but if I slack off for an hour, who am I going to charge that to? It's fraud to charge that time.

I feel like there's a difference between slacking off at work and lying about how you spend your time.

She literally admitted falsifying her timesheets, and the only reason she got a court order to repay Reach was that she filed a fraudulent lawsuit claiming unfair dismissal - presumably assuming they'd just pay to have her go away.

Yeah this just demonstrates the courts being out of touch with reality when it comes to labor issues like this.

Does that mean employees can sue their ex employers for wage-theft if they can plausibly show they e.g. worked extra hours without compensation? Or is this one of those cases where it only works one-way?

In the United States, if you are an hourly employee, yes federal labor laws dictate that you can file a complaint against your employer for violating labor laws. Part of this process involves forcing the employer to pay you wages owed, while the entire process usually involves a pretty stiff fine against the employer to discourage the practice altogether.

So in practice it is easier for employees to seek recompensation for wage theft than it is for employers since they don't have to front the cost of legal representation.

Just wanted to add that this process is free. It costs nothing to file a complaint with the Department of Labor, they do the investigating/prosecuting at no cost to workers. Retaliation against workers for filing such complaints is illegal.

You’ve always been able to sue for wage theft.

Edit: I’m in America, the article is Canadian. I don’t know about canada.

In Australia there's no need to sue, if you approach a government agency with evidence they will investigate and force the employer to back pay.

Yes you can sue for wage theft it works both ways.

For people who aren't reading the article:

* She was not performing well at work: behind schedule, over budget, etc

* Her company started having weekly meetings with her to address this

* After five months of this, they installed monitoring software, with her permission.

* The monitoring software showed she was not working the hours she was reporting

* She admitted to falsifying her time sheets: "Clearly, it’s, I’ve plugged hours that I shouldn’t have plugged to files um when I wasn’t working on them and like, I can’t hide that"

* They fired her - quite reasonably: the person isn't achieving the expected performance, and on top of that is falsifying their time sheets.

* She then sued them for unfair dismissal, and they produced the documentation of the above, including the fraud, and the court ordered she repay the company.

For people who think that the company is in the wrong: what should they have done instead?

Similarly for the court: a person brings a suit saying they were wrongfully dismissed, and the evidence shows not only were they underperforming, documented as underperforming, the employer had made the person aware they were underperforming, the employer was trying to get the employee to the expected level of performing, and on top of that she has admitted to falsifying some time sheets, and the company has even more documentation demonstrating that the employee was falsifying them in bulk. Despite that the company is now having to spend money defending themselves against a clearly false claim in court.

You would not want to work in a company that install software to track you. You cannot be overly efficient in a company that does not appreciate it. You do not want to make up hours you did not work. You want to have good communication with your boss/employees. I cannot see anyone wanting to work for that company.

They asked to install the software in response to her not doing her job, and presumably were suspicious about over reporting working hours.

> Reach said it installed employee-tracking software called TimeCampon Besse’s work laptop after it found her assigned files were over budget and behind schedule

IMO, that phrase is key. It's horrible to do this kind of thing to all of your employees as a matter of course, but I don't see an issue with doing it on an individual basis to specific employees who aren't getting their work done.

Removing equally frequent measures of normal by leaving enforcement checks to discretion is basically a method to create a biased system to target anyone who is suspicious to any authority and confirm every authority with arbitrary biases is a really good judge of character.

To me, even if an employee does not do their work, this is an absurd ruling. Just fire the employee and move on. If we allow this to continue/become the norm, we are voluntarily choosing to give _more_ money to the rich few who own companies.

They did fire her and move on.

Then she sued them for wrongful termination. The judgment wasn't in her favour.

The facts presented to the tribunal were brutal and painted her in a very bad light. She could have avoided the negative outcome by not having sued the employer in the first place.

Ahh I definitely missed that.

This is basically a tool to fire whoever you want with cause. Almost everyone works less than 8 hour days, so if you want to fire someone with cause you just selectively install time tracking software on their hardware.

So the employer from TFA that no sane person would never ever want to work for is Reach CPA. I’m making a mental note to never, under any circumstance, do any business with Reach CPA. I wonder what Reach CPA employees think about this whole situation. TBH I would rather be unemployed than work for Reach CPA. The thought of working for Reach CPA actually gives me anxiety. Reach CPA is not a company I would ever want to be associated with.

They only installed the activity tracking after she was behind, and I'm guessing they were suspicious about how much time she was working.

She agreed to having monitoring software installed. That software demonstrated that she was not doing work, but was billing for that work.

The alternative was presumably just firing her immediately, and not letting her demonstrate she was doing the work.

Despite knowing she had this monitoring software installed, she continued to not work, she continued to lie about doing work, and the company fired her - at best she wasn't getting the work done, at worst she was committing fraud.

This legal ruling was the result of her then suing them for unfair dismissal. If she had just accepted that she was fired for not doing her job this wouldn't have happened. Instead she claimed unfair dismissal for a process that any reasonable person would understand had been thoroughly documented. The company showed up to her lawsuit, with the evidence of how they came to fire her, and the additional evidence of fraud, leading to this outcome.

Can you say Reach CPA again? I'm not sure it's in there enough times.

Enough has been said about Reach CPA’s disgraceful employee treatment.

What is an over budget file?

This reminds me of the British post office software debacle that sent innocent workers to prison for fraud. Software doesn't prove anything, it burden of proof should be on the prosecution to prove that the software works. Also the defence should have the right to a 3rd party audit

But in this case they did prove it, beyond any reasonable doubt. The article makes that clear. She was lying to them, and when caught lied again, and then when immediately caught again eventually admitted that she had been defrauding them ... and then sued them for wrongful dismissal anyway. No wonder the judge tossed her case out.

Actually in this case, more like defrauding the eventual customers, as she was filling timesheets which usually means her time was being billed out.

That's why her case was tossed and she has to repay her former employer.

Future historians are gonna look back at this time and wonder.

A once in a century pandemic leading to a unique situation where workers, finally, after decades, had power over employers, and those workers used it to fight for remote work? Remote work that reduced their pay, reduced their advantages over people from countries with worse labor protections making them cheaper, transferred costs from the employers, to the employees, reduced chances of the workers building industry connections that would potentially allow them to apply for new jobs, etc?

The real problem workers faced was bad commutes. Instead of fighting for better commutes, they decided to fight to make themselves increasingly disposable and pick up an increasing amount of the costs of working.

Personally remote work has been life-changing in a positive way.

- I make more than 2x what I made last year, in part because the types of jobs I could apply for expanded massively.

- I'm able to work in my prefered tech stack. Serverless, NoSQL, React, Typescript. It's beautiful and I love it. Nothing in my town (population 250k+) works on this stack, I looked for months.

- I can focus more at work. I don't need to tell anyone who's worked in an office just how distracting they can be.

- My days are extremely flexible now. I can take a long lunch to catch up with a friend and just make up the work some other time in the day, or tomorrow. Nobody really cares as long as the work gets done. It's benefited my social life massively to have a flexible schedule.

- I don't have to pay for commuting with gas or my time. This also benefits the planet.

- I'm able to spend time with my pet every day for hours. It makes me feel kinda bad for pets who's owners have to leave them for a total of 8 hours a day.

The list keeps going but I'll stop there. Definitely speak for yourself on this and consider that remote life is just better for some people.

> The real problem workers faced was bad commutes.

I'm not sure that's true. For example, I've read a lot of complaints about open offices. I personally have trouble working properly in open-offices. I would choose a job with a longer commute if it allowed me to avoid open offices.

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