We’re About To Redefine Time Punch

I’m an assistant manager for a national rotisserie chicken chain. One Friday night, an employee comes up to me.

Employee: “Hey, I think there are some hours missing from my paycheck. Can you look into it for me?”

Me: “Sure. When things calm down a bit, I’ll be happy to do that for you.”

When I have spare time a few hours later, I go back into the back office computer to run the Time Punch Audit Report. It is a report that shows if any time punches have been changed on the computer.

I run it and… wow. She doesn’t have SOME hours deleted from her paycheck; she has around fourteen hours deleted… and she isn’t the only one!

Practically every employee has an hour or so, here or there, deleted from every single day that they have worked! Most were under the general manager’s sign in, but some were done under MINE!

For those, I immediately check the CCTV footage and I see that I was nowhere near the back office computer at the time that it happened… but the general manager was.

I go up to the employee that same night.

Me: “Yeah, you had fourteen hours deleted off your paycheck. Do me a favor: keep this quiet for now? I’m going to see our area manager about this in a meeting on Monday. I’ll be printing some stuff up, and then I’ll tell him and give him the proof.”

The area manager is in charge of around eight restaurants. On Monday, I see him and give him the reports. He is in disbelief at first.

Area Manager: “I… can’t see why your general manager would do this. You guys are always in great shape on labor.”

Me: “Well, I think I know why we’re always in great shape.”

He didn’t seem to have anything to say to that.

After a few weeks of investigating, we found that our area manager had around 600 pages, dating back six months, of altered time punches. We wound up having to pay every current — and quite a few former — employees back pay of almost $10,000 due to time deleted off.

Our general manager was fired, though I don’t know if anything else was done on the legal end. I suspected that the whole “altering time punches” thing was an unspoken, company-wide practice, since I discovered that quite a few other managers ended up being no longer with the company shortly afterward.