Clocking cases – Is that you, cardboard box?
If your employer has a time and attendance system, not clocking in is not an option. What if there is a way of sneaking the system? Buddy clocking or time theft on a big scale.
What happened?
23 Council workers in Italy tricked their time and attendance system to skirt work.
Their method? Cardboard boxes on their heads, to avoid identification as they clock in and out.
The baffling method was captured on CCTV. Workers sent family members, friends and coworkers to clock in and out for them.
The 23 employees from the town of Boscotrecase near Naples were all prosecuted. With six put under house arrest, 13 suspended for a year and four suspended for six months.
With all of their staff prosecuted and unable to work, four council offices closed.
This is not the first Italian public sector clocking scandal to hit the press. 35 people were arrested and 195 people were placed under investigation for absenteeism in northwest Italy.
The lesson learnt:
If the act of clocking in and out is not enough to deter your workers from time theft, you need to adopt biometric clocking methods.
Biometric clocking methods include fingerprint and facial recognition and make it impossible for workers to clock each other.
As the clocking terminal uses a workers face or unique fingerprint to authenticate their attendance, only the actual person meant to be clock can do so successfully.
Biometric clocking doesn’t store pictures of this sensitive data. So there’s no need to worry about security issues.
It simply scans key characteristics of the body and codes them. When clocking, the terminal then looks for these unique characteristics. It will fail to clock anyone who does not match the exact code.
If using a biometric system, such as Citadel, the Italian civil sector workers could not have simply put a cardboard box on their heads.
It would instantly flag as an absence and record in the system in real-time. Bye-bye time theft.
No money lost on labour, and four public offices would not shut down due to theft.
You can find out more about the popular methods available for Time and Attendance clocking and the reasons why businesses choose them in this uAttend article.
Reference: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3686493/Public-sector-workers-Italy-use-cardboard-boxes-cheat-time-clocks.html
Find out more about our clocking systems here.
Any questions, or if you’d like to request a free online demo to see how clocking in with Citadel could work for you, call 01761 410015, email us or click the chat icon.
