A British Columbia accountant has been ordered by a tribunal to pay her former employer more than $2,600 after tracking software showed she engaged in “time theft” while working from home.
The decision, published this week by the Civil Resolution Tribunal, shows the woman claimed $5,000 to cover unpaid wages and severance pay, claiming she was fired without cause last March.
But the employer, Reach CPA Inc., filed a counterclaim with evidence showing a 50-hour discrepancy between her timesheets and the activity recorded by the tracking software on her work computer.
The decision shows the woman began working remotely in October 2021 and Reach installed the software, called TimeCamp, on her laptop four months later, shortly after she and her manager met to discuss her performance.
The tribunal said Reach compared the woman’s timesheets with data from the software for a month between the end of February and March and found that she had claimed 50 hours in which she did not appear to have worked.
The judgment orders her to pay Reach $2,603 plus interest on the debt and damages for theft of time and an outstanding portion of an advance the company gave her for home office equipment and educational fees, along with a $125 tribunal fee.
The woman told the tribunal she could not explain the 50 hours that were not accounted for as she did not fully understand how to use the software, it said.
But tribunal member Megan Stewart found that didn’t matter, given the program automatically tracked the gap between her work and personal activities.
“Theft of time in the context of employment is regarded as a very serious form of offence,” said the decision published on Wednesday.
Trust and honesty are essential to the employment relationship, especially in a telecommuting environment, it says.
The woman’s misconduct led to an “irreparable breakdown in her employment relationship with Reach,” Stewart said in the ruling, finding that “dismissal was proportionate to the circumstances.”
The woman also told the tribunal that she had spent time working with hard copies that TimeCamp would not have caught, the ruling noted, but Reach had provided data showing that with the time she spent printing, she would not have been able to printed the large volume of documents he would need.
Even if she worked with hard copies, Stewart found no evidence that the woman uploaded her work to the company’s electronic system or otherwise demonstrated that she spent a significant period of time performing work-related tasks in relation to with the 50 hours not accounted for.
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