More Perils of Paperless Accounting

["Joe Pezzillo" <jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Another paperless accounting scandal in the works, and I hope the 
average American will be able to understand this one. More of the shame 
that greed is fostering throughout the land. -Joe



Altering of Worker Time Cards Spurs Growing Number of Suits
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by Steven Greenhouse
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/national/04WAGE.html
April 4, 2004



As a former member of the Air Force military police, as a 
play-by-the-rules guy, Drew Pooters said he was stunned by what he 
found his manager doing in the Toys "R" Us store in Albuquerque.

Inside a cramped office, he said, his manager was sitting at a computer 
and altering workers' time records, secretly deleting hours to cut 
their paychecks and fatten his store's bottom line.

"I told him, `That's not exactly legal,' " said Mr. Pooters, who ran 
the store's electronics department. "Then he out-and-out threatened me 
not to talk about what I saw."

Mr. Pooters quit, landing a job in 2002 managing a Family Dollar store, 
one of 5,100 in that discount chain. Top managers there ordered him not 
to let employees' total hours exceed a certain amount each week, and 
one day, he said, his district manager told him to use a trick to cut 
payroll: delete some employee hours electronically.

"I told her, `I'm not going to get involved in this,' " Mr. Pooters 
recalled, saying that when he refused, the district manager erased the 
hours herself.

Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly 
employees' time records is far more prevalent than most Americans 
believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and 
hard to detect — a simple matter of computer keystrokes — and has 
spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide 
range of businesses.