Woman ordered to repay $2k after her employer used software to track her time
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If your boss found out you were getting someone to stamp your timesheet several hours before you actually came into work every day, that would be considered theft as well.
If she were on salary, it would be a different story, because exempt workers get paid for the job getting done, not the hours it takes.
A recent full-time contract of mine stated (slight paraphrase) "as a fulltime employee, you are required to devote all working hours to your position. Your working hours will typically be 9:30am-5pm, and you will be required to be reachable and ready to work during this time."
But this pervasive electronic surveillance has to stop. The end result of all that is a lot worse than someone getting away with 50 hours of paid work they didn't actually do.
Not sure how much "AI" this TimeCamp software uses, if any, but it's quite easy to imagine a near-future world where some software says you didn't do the work you said you did, and you have no recourse, and the method the software uses to determine this is proprietary and secret, and no one really can explain how or why its AI draws the conclusions it makes anyway.
For a WFH desk job without real-time latency requirements, an hourly rate makes no sense at all to me.
If you think measurement is abusive now, wait till everything they do is tracked and monitored to determine _results_.
Sounds like she should have set something up to open and close documents automatically if none have been accessed for a certain period of time.
The existing companies that pull that crap ought to be reprimanded themselves. I worked for Gallup for a very short, very miserable tenure. When they casually mentioned that they had increased the number of completed surveys for a particular client required to meet quota simply because employees were meeting the quotas too easily, I got the heck out of there. The company was getting paid the same per survey by the client independent of how many surveys were completed per hour. They saw an opportunity to increase profits by decreasing bonus pay and away they went. It wasn't a one-off situation, it was SOP. I feel like I say this daily anymore, but there ought to be a law.
In doing so, I broke the half-sheet "contract" I had to sign requiring me to work for the company for at least 6 months under threat of lawsuit. Which is 110% unenforceable in my state and most others in the US. Didn't have to break the non-compete specifically, but it strongly reminds me of the way companies all over the country try to intimidate employees into staying in a crappy employment situation by making them sign scary, but completely unactionable contracts that the average employee is intended to mistake for a legitimate threat to their ability to provide for themselves and their families.
No, it's easy to tell when you lie about the number of hours spent in the office.
If the remote-working employees are not performing to the level you require (and it seems that this woman was not, which is why they turned on the tracking in the first place) you can tell them to improve or they're out.
I'm fine with software making the accusation, as long as software isn't able to override the accused's sworn testimony that the accusations are false.
She admitted on video that she misrepresented some working hours “by mistake.” That video was cited in the ruling.
[1] https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2021/sep/15/clash-bet...
"More than 700 Post Office managers were given criminal convictions after a new computer software system, built by the Japanese firm Fujitsu, wrongly showed money was going missing from individual branches between 2000 and 2014."
I don't think enough people are thinking about how small changes like these can cascade over time and become huge issues. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
For more ideas, just think about the things that are worth between $0 and minimum wage to do, and pay people to do those things. Picking up trash on the side of the road for example.
Even though the best chess players in the world are computers, sports is more than just the pursuit of perfection. Imperfections are what make it interesting. Sports is about the story you can tell.
FTA:
"I've plugged time to files that I didn't touch and that wasn't right or appropriate in any way or fashion, and I recognize that and so for that I'm really sorry," Besse said in a meeting with her company, according to video cited in the ruling.She works as a CPA for an accounting firm—-there are several types of occupations like hers where time tracking isn’t just for her employers payroll, but very likely how the firm bills its clients. Similar professions would include: architects, lawyers, etc. A lot of software tools for these professions automatically log time expressly for the purpose of billing the client. Chief Architect, for example, presents a pop up asking if the time tracker should be paused if you’re idle for too long. Her timecard fraud isn’t just stealing from her employer, but very likely causing her employer to overcharge (ie steal from) their customers. The firm would almost certainly refund the fraudulent billings to their customers, (lest they lose the customer or worse—-get sued). The money recuperate from the fired employee is most likely being allocated for this.
Amusingly, SHE sued THEM first. They would have gone to great lengths to gather data, pay attorneys, etc to demonstrate that their termination of her was justifiable. Having already invested in their own exoneration, why wouldn’t they counter sue to mitigate their losses?
There's a business idea, develop a time tracking software that tracks if lawyers etc. are actually charging the correct time. Funnily enough while they are quite happy for their employees to use software like this, I seriously doubt they would agree to clients using the same software.
incorrect. exempt vs. non-exempt is a federal labor law term in the US.
https://www.flsa.com/coverage.html
exempt means you are exempt from the 1938 FLSA rules, which is when you earn above a certain salary or perform certain duties - manager vs. sales, etc. you are not guaranteed overtime pay (time-and-a-half, double on sundays), etc. non-exempt means subject to all the FLSA rules.
typically white color salaried jobs are exempt and hourly jobs are not but not always. due to the salary limits, there are jobs that are salaried that are non-exempt.
and salaried jobs are not always paid for getting the job done vs. hours. engineering firms (apparently accounting) and other firms that charge clients by the hour still require timekeeping by their salaried employees. mis-charging is worse than wage theft in this case it causes the firm to perpetrate fraud on the client.
many salaried firms have requirements for 40 hour minimum as well with or without timekeeping. if you're exempt you have less, not more, labor laws that apply. you can agree to a job that requires you to be in the office or online or whatever for 47 1/8 hours a week, and then if you don't do it, you can be fired just for that regardless of whether you got the job done.
the only point is to clarify that she may or may not be exempt, and may or may not have been hourly or salaried - any combination of these can still be required to work certain hours and keep time records.
> if she were on salary, it would be a different story
not really. you can still mis-charge on salary, which is extremely serious which is fraud and time-theft. and she clearly wasn't "getting the job done" either.
karma. i absolutely love this story because the company didn't even go after her for the lost time until in a genius move she sued them. it's pretty obvious she was a poor employee on a pip within less that a year of starting. and then, knowingly on a pip, still mis-charges, etc.?
Not entirely clear, but it sounds like she sued first, and then they dug into the time accounting more precisely, and calculated the exact discrepancy. Would have been better to walk away.
1. She got fired by company, company did not sue her for stealing time.
2. She tried to sue the company that fired her. It failed. She was ordered to repay $2k in court fees or because of the stolen time?
> Now, a civil tribunal, which is part of Canada's judicial system, has ruled that Besse owes her former company $2,756 after the software installed on her laptop revealed she misrepresented over 50 hours at work.
Ah... did she bill by the hour or something? Not salary?
She was fired. She sued the company, claiming unfair dismissal. The company managed to prove that she was fired for a cause and the civil resolution tribunal deemed she owed her employer that much.
Her employer did not sue her.
Her employer fired her for underperforming and falsifying her time sheets.
She sued her employer saying that that was not a valid cause.
The court said that it clearly was and that she now had to pay back some of the costs.
She would have gotten away with falsifying her timesheets if she hadn't decided to sue them.
Also: The monitoring software was not installed until after she had been underperforming and presumably had suspicious billing, and it was installed with her permission.
>Her employer did not sue her.
Did I suggest otherwise?
>Her employer fired her for underperforming and falsifying her time sheets.
Did I suggest otherwise?
>She sued her employer saying that that was not a valid cause.
Did I suggest otherwise?
>The court said that it clearly was and that she now had to pay back some of the costs.
Did I suggest otherwise?
>She would have gotten away with falsifying her timesheets if she hadn't decided to sue them.
Did I suggest otherwise?
> Most important to my mind is the time period this occured in.
“Karlee Besse, was employed as an accountant by the respondent and applicant by counterclaim, Reach CPA Inc. (Reach), from October 12, 2021 to March 29, 2022”
> One seems like a reasonable reason for dismissal and the other seems like nickel-and-diming a low-level employee.
It is important to note that the company didn’t start nickel-and-diming her. She was underperforming. They suspected the hours she was reporting thus they installed the time tracking software. She kept underpeforming and they let her go. She sued the company. If she just have left she would not have had to pay them anything. Based on the article.
I am right with you on the general theme of employer abuses and wage theft, but it doesn't seem like this was one of those cases.
I'm more concerned about the normalization of electronic surveillance.
It's also important to realize the monitoring software was installed after she was already underperforming for an extended period. It was also not the sole evidence. If you actually read the case:
* She admitted to falsifying her time sheet
* She was already on some kind of PIP
* The monitoring software recorded that she was not doing work on her machine, but also recorded whether she printed out documents, as she claimed, but she had not.
* The file access logs also showed she was not opening them.
* And again: she admitted she falsified her reporting
Finally: The company did not sue her for this time. After she was fired for the above she sued them claiming they weren't justified in firing her after she falsified her time sheets and demonstrably lied about the work she did. In response the court ordered her to pay back at least some costs.
A lot of companies "allow" this, but IMHO it's playing with fire. I strongly recommend that people don't use company-owned equipment for personal activities, and vice-versa.
Wasn't there an article a while back where someone was complaining that her employer demanded to examine the contents of her work phone but she didn't want to because she had nudes on it? Like what on earth would possess you to put personal information on a device that is owned and remotely managed by your work, let alone nudes?
I believe that was this, unless there was more than once documented instance of such a thing happening (which is definitely plausible): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28241753
If this woman's claims do have any merit, I wouldn't be surprised if it's due to something like having some entertainment playing while working, and the software wrongly attributing that as not working when it's actually solid work time.
When I worked in a bank it was fairly common for contractors to have a non-bank laptop with 3G/4G internet on it that never touched the bank network. I don't know the fine print but it seemed like a security issue to me.
Moonlighting? Porn?
Complaining-about-work type texts (eg you can text on the Mac)
Leetcoding or similar, anything that indicates you might be looking elsewhere or preparing to look
Even just watching YouTube etc when having a break can make you seem disengaged
The list goes on and on…
Electronic pathway you say? Well, guess you've gotta be an industry person to know what the hell that is...
I'm not trying to validate it. I'm just saying that we are in a transitory stage towards UBI and that is supported by the surge of "quiet quitting" that we are seeing.
After reading the decision on detail, I don’t think my comment was helpful.
I have to admit.. up until now, I let my company run on my general wifi at home, but now.. I think I will create a separate tunnel just for them. The less they know the better.
Read it again. She went after the company.
I am not arguing she is right. Frankly, case suggests she is in the wrong for several different reasons. But then, she is accountant, does management really think she is making widgets on an per hour basis?
I think her biggest mistake is using work PC for personal use. That is just not a good idea.
edit:
<< She went after the company.
She argued she was not fired for cause. That is hardly going after the company.
<< Besse argued that she found the program difficult to use and she could not get the software to differentiate between work and time spent on her work laptop for personal use — which, both parties agree, her employer allowed during staff's off-hours.
<< When Canadian accountant Karlee Besse was fired for being unproductive at her job, she found herself up against not only her former employer, but its time-tracking software, too.
<< Besse worked remotely for Reach CPA, an accounting firm based in British Columbia, Canada. The dispute began last year when Besse claimed she was fired without "just cause."
<< Her employer argued that Besse was rightfully let go because she engaged in time theft. Reach CPA said it gathered evidence using TimeCamp
<< Besse also argued that she spent a significant amount of time working with paper documents, but didn't tell her company because "they wouldn't want to hear that."
There are cases for both "they are clearly slacking and watching some show instead of working" and "it just acts like background noise, no different from running a TV in same room"
Wage theft is pervasive, and I'd bet they'd be paying out a lot more than they got back here.
If my employees are spending a lot of their time goofing off, that’s an indication that I’m doing a poor job keeping them motivated and is an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re doing and how.
The idea of weaponizing “time theft” as a first recourse is just sickening to me. Your employees are not slaves nor drones, they are human beings and you have an obligation to treat them as such.
Sorta like software outsourcing, actually.
So even if she were not being paid hourly (though the court ordered repayment implies she was?), the company would have required accurate recording for billing clients.
The company also didn't just arbitrarily install the monitoring software. She was already underperforming, and on some PIP-equivalent setup when they got her consent to add monitoring software - I would guess that they were already thinking she was falsifying her time sheets at this point.
Then she sued for wrongful termination and got that result.
Because the first thing I thought was: What kind of petty employer sues for $2000 instead of just letting them go.
[1] https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/5230...
I really wanted to be upset with the company here, but it sounds like she shot herself in the foot.
Both of these things can be valid at the same time. She was certainly technically in the wrong and made some questionable choices (with the huge caveat that it’s possible context we don’t have may change the story entirely), but I still think the company is overbearing to the point of absurdity.
If she slacked off for 50 hours over 6 weeks, that’s like an hour and a half a day (which may not have been contiguous). I can’t think of a job I’ve ever had where I didn’t have an hour of down time a day on average. Even working crappy manual labor jobs I’m sure I dicked around with my coworkers for like an hour a day.
She may be a bit on the high end there, but not so much that I wouldn’t have worked with her to correct it before firing her.
Yeah. It is called an article. Typically provides the context for the title.
The article is beautifully written and links to the actual small claims decision. Which is honestly so rare that I don’t even know when have I seen in non-specialist media.
What the headline needs is people reading beyond it, and not reacting from first instinct. Grumble grumble :)
Nothing in the article contradicts my post. The lady was almost certainly billing time she didn’t work, but I would still ask myself what I’ve done to enable that before I just fired her.
I’m disinclined to assume the good faith and intention of a company using invasive software to monitor every minute of the day.
I was not sure that you didn’t read the article. I was just suspecting it.
> Nothing in the article contradicts my post.
Au contraire. You wrote: “The idea of weaponizing ‘time theft’ as a first recourse is just sickening to me.”
That is not what happened in this case at all.
The company was unhappy with her performance and they let her go. She sued them. Does that sound like the company weaponised anything?
So why are you talking about “weaponising” and “first recourse”? How can it be “weaponised” when she was the one who was suing the company What is first recourse about this?
In fact if you read the small claims court case (linked from the article), you can see that she started working in October 12, 2021. They first talked about performance problems with her manager in February the next year. That is when they installed the time tracking software! She was put on a PIP in March 16. And she was dismissed on March 29th.
So clearly they were not weaponizing time theft, nor was it their first recourse.
Maybe you were just commenting in general how sickening it is to weaponise time theft as a first recourse. In which case I would have expected some mention that you are just speaking in general, noting that in this specific case that did not happen. Since you didn’t say that I suspected that you either didn’t read the article carefull enough to understand the case, or didn’t read it at all.
- The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee.
- The manager should have initiated them, not the employee.
- When the employee asked for help, the response was to install time monitoring software on her computer
From my perspective, the time software was absolutely weaponized against the employee. I call this a “first recourse” because it precluded an improvement plan. I’m reading this as “oh, you’re not getting enough work done huh? Well let me just stand over your desk and scrutinize your minute to minute work for a month to make sure you’re not slacking off”. Sure, it’s legal and a court didn’t find issue with it, but that doesn’t make it ethical, and it has zero chance of helping a struggling employee.
If I had one of my direct reports reach out to me and say they felt unproductive I can simply not fathom responding to that by treating them like a delinquent.
Edit because I clearly don’t know how HN formatting works
> The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee.
I agree with you on this here. On the other hand I can’t find any source to tell if they had 1-1s from the begining or not. If they hadn’t that is a serious mistake. (If you see this somewhere mentioned I’ happy to see a reference. But do not worry either way, no pressure.)
> The manager should have initiated them, not the employee.
I agree with that too! Again I don’t know if that happened or not. The court case suggest that it was the employee who initiated the chat. I can also imagine that if I am an employer and I am being sued I would stick to the hard facts. The things I can prove. And if there are enough of these hard facts to show that I did not commit what I am accused of (unfair dismissal) the I wouldn’t bring up all the informal and thus undocumented instances where we talked about performance.
It is possible in my mind either way, and I can’t say for sure. Maybe it is an instance of bad management, paird with over reliance on a time traking software. Maybe it is good management paired with a regetably underpeforming employee. Maybe something in between!
But here is the thing: This is not the reason why this case was thrust into the public spotlight.
It is in the public spotlight because the outcome has the appearance as if she got sued by the company to extract money from her. I certainly started reading with that assumption! But then reading the article I have noticed that this is not the case. I have also noticed that many commenters, not necessarily you, seems to have fallen into the same idea and did not read the article carefull enough to see that this doesn’t seem to be the case. Which perhaps is the fault of the article. (But of course we all understand that “woman sues company, company vindicated” is not such a catchy title, so I even understand why they went for the angle they did.)
Truth to be told on the general managerial advice and recommendations I agree very much with you. Cheers
From the court findings: “In February 2022, Miss Besse began having weekly meetings with her manager to help her better manage her files. She says she initiated the meetings because she felt unproductive and that she was not performing as well as she should have been. On February 21, 2022, Reach installed a time-tracking program called TimeCamp on Miss Besse’s work laptop.”
This is actually the point where I got angry and felt that I needed to comment. Usually these articles are filled with one-sides opinions, but here we have a formal accounting of events from the court. According to the court, Besse went to her manager because she was struggling and the response could be called intimidation.
I’ve been managing for long enough that this, to me, calls into question the cause of the events here. It’s possible this lady was just lazy and is entirely at fault; but when I see a paper trail indicating a failure of management to engage I wonder if the whole thing could have been avoided with some empathy and servant leadership.
Hours were certainly logged fraudulently, I’m not debating that. I’m saying that rather than firing her, I would have asked a lot of questions about the situation and if I pushed her to feel like she needed to.
The software they were using sounds like what I have seen myself in the past, and it is a huge burden to try and justify every moment of every day the way they want you to. It’s basically a guarantee for burnout and lack of loyalty.
Not proud of this fact, but my father got caught punching in the time clock at the Heinz ketchup factory, and then going back home to sleep a few times every week. They were faster to catch him because of the clock.
Some professions require employees to track time in smaller increments than 10 minutes (IIRC most lawyers at firms in the US bill in six-minute increments), but that's for the purpose of billing that time to the correct client, not as a way of micromanaging the employee.
Your ticket updates were expected to be to the exact minute, and there was a counter at the top to tell you how close you were to your 8 hours.
Many starting out would end up needing 10-12h to make that 8.
There’s a mental cost to being tracked so rigidly, and the burnout it leads to may be -why- hours get logged fraudulently.
Employers must forget the 40 hour week as a measure of someone's productivity and instead set goals to be achieved.
Manage/Treat people like people,be kind, but firm, if you can't trust someone in your team, you hired wrong or you have trust issues yourself. Its not rocket science, no matter how much BS the Simon Sinek`s of the world spout out.
Someone should notify HR about this injustice.
"How are you today, Mr. 142,620?"
"I'm fine, nameless, faceless script-reading CSR rep. How are you?"
For task based jobs by all means figure out a cost and bill by the item. Some professionals do this. I paid my accountant $600 and didn’t care how long it took her.
I don't think all his managers and leads were bad.
I think I agree but it isn’t that simple in many countries/legal jurisdictions. You can’t always just fire someone and performance managing an employee is utterly gruelling if the individual wants to make it so.
My point was that low productivity is fault of manager sometimes, but other times it is fully fault of the low producing person. Especially when you a single low producing person in otherwise normally effective team.
Sounds like a good soundbite from a management book or something. You don't think there's a possibility that someone, idk, doesn't want to work and prefers doing something else? I've been guilty of playing video games during the workday and its not due to lack of motivation or the manager doing something wrong ... I simply want to do something thats not work. Not the managers fault.
It's possible, but that's really what the interview process is supposed to be for. In programming, this is kind of a necessity, because from the outside, deep work looks exactly like "loafing". You can't threaten, harass, cajole or otherwise motivate somebody to actually mentally focus on something the way you could, say, threaten to chop off their hands if they stop digging for diamonds. You might want to, but even you would eventually have to conclude that it didn't work. Ultimately, you have to trust the people responsible for doing the work.
Worse, from the outside causing major problems that will only show up later looks exactly like typing really intently.
I remember one horrible problem I had dumped on me where I spent a week reading stuff online and doodling. Once I had a doodle I liked I threw together a multithreaded user authentication system in a week then spent a week making sure it actually worked. CIO was very impressed but afterwards admitted the first week drove him quietly insane. Luckily my team leader kept saying "that's what thinking looks like". Some managers completely miss point of thinking, and not just when other people are doing it /s
That’s why it’s an “indication” and not a “guarantee”.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
Also, it wasn't their first recourse. They fired her, but then she sued and they took their documentation to court and counter-sued. It was factually their last recourse.
The company in question is an accounting firm; imagine if you hired that firm to do your personal taxes, and the person who was doing them inflated the number of hours it took, and then the firm billed you more than it actually cost them to do the work. I know I'd be outraged if that happened. I'd sue them, never use them again, and tell everyone I know not to use them.
Or a more apt example, considering your profession: imagine you're a software engineering manager at a software consulting firm. Your reports do work for a variety of your company's clients, and they have to record how much time they spend working on each client's work so that the client can be billed appropriately. Let's say that your reports are even paid a salary, and aren't paid hourly, even though they have to track their time. I personally don't think it's ok to bill a client for the time someone is doomscrolling Twitter or replying to personal email. But I agree with you that it should be fine that your people aren't generating billable hours every minute of every day. But they have to be honest about that on their timesheets.
The issue that I have here is that it sounds like the company is set up for failure. Rigidly monitoring your employees is a great way to burn them out and kills loyalty. If you want people to work hard, offering a little trust goes a long way.
It’s always worth asking what you could have done better as a leader and starting with an assumption that they’re not just criminals.
step 2 - disavow perverse management methodologies, because "you're not like those other managers".
step 3 - do it anyway because the higher-ups said so.
step 4 - convince yourself you're not part of the problem ;)
Timecards where serious business where I worked as they billed based on them. Though to be fair they never monitored us once we were at work. I don't think they even checked our badge in/out times vs our timecards, which we manually entered. I remember the "we have a gym, we want you healthy, but you use the gym on your own time" email.