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Comment by feoren | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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