Stop time fraud now with our flagship system

It is 2018, and yet companies are still using self-reporting timesheets to record their employee hours. Why?

Self-reporting has multiple drawbacks.

Firstly, you are relying on people’s memory. People are likely to forget exactly what hours they worked, especially if the timesheet is monthly rather than hourly, and to fill it in with general ideas, “Oh, I probably worked here to here.” Inaccurate reporting can lead to inaccurate payslips, which can cause all sorts of headaches for employers later on.

Secondly, you are relying on people’s honesty.

Did they actually do the hours that they’ve written down here? How do you know?

Timesheet fraud is a universal problem. Here are just a few recent cases from the UK and USA where the faulty system failed.

1. A former sheriff’s deputy from Kentucky has been charged with stealing more than $10,000. The offender was questioned over discrepancies in his time sheets, on which he allegedly claimed for overtime that he never actually worked. Source
2. A Band 7 management-level nurse who had worked the NHS for 8 years admitted to submitting false timesheets 72 times in order to supplement her income, for a total of £10,402.92. She falsely claimed she had worked weekends and bank holidays, and even submitted travel expenses for a conference she never attended. Source
3. In Comlubia, USA, a man and woman are accused of defrauding Medicaid by submitting time sheets for their home care attendant for hours that weren’t actually worked. Medicaid lost nearly $7,700 from the fraud. Source
4. An auxiliary nurse named Harbans Dhaliwal submitted her monthly timesheets to her Nuneaton hospital. By the time that her timesheets were examined (nearly two years after she had started work), she had falsely claimed for over 230 shifts. Over that time, she had received £49,878 in total. Source
5. Mr Dickson, a 62-year-old man from south-east London, has been prosecuted after supposedly acting as a carer and fraudulently receiving Direct Payments totalling £24,118.00. The man he was supposed to be caring for had moved back to Ghana, despite fraudulently claiming Mr Dickon as his carer. Mr Dickson submitted regular timesheets to the Council claiming that he had been providing care to Mr Z. Source

That’s over $17,000 and £83,000 of fraudulent money stolen by people using paper timesheets.

And these are just cases reported in the last six weeks!

The first answer to this situation is to switch from using a retrospective, self-reporting method of recording time to a daily, unbiased recording method.

Clocking terminals are ideal for this. They require a physical presence to clock you in and out, and all clocking data is immediately stored in the database. If there is a network failure and the terminal can’t transfer its clocking data to the main database, it can hold up to 32,000 clocking transactions.

This clocking data can then be exported straight from the WinTA.NET software in a format suitable for all leading payroll programmes.

Our terminals can be configured to accept different levels of authentication, from just a smart card all the way up to PIN, smart card and biometrics.

Smart cards are a cheap and effective way of clocking your employees in and out; however, if you are very worried about fraud, or are fed up of people losing their smartcards, then you will want a biometric clocking terminal. Smart cards can be stolen or passed to a friend, in a scam called “buddy punching” or “buddy clocking”, but employees can’t do that with biometrics!

The biometric methods that we offer are fingerprint scanners and hand geometry scanners.

Neither of these store actual prints, as that is an unnecessary use of personal information. In the finger scanner, the print patterns are converted into a code through a secure algorithm. The hand scanner stores the geometry, size and shape of the hand. These details are then stored for future authentication.

Whenever registered users have their fingerprints scanned, a comparison is made between the live fingerprint and the stored fingerprint template and if the two match, the event is saved in the controller database.

This time and attendance system makes it much more difficult for employees to claim wages they aren’t entitled to.

If you would like to find out more about the workforce management systems from Time and Attendance UK, just contact us. We would be more than happy to answer all your questions and queries.