Posted on 01/14/2023 12:16:00 AM PST by blueplum
A Canadian accountant has been ordered by a court to repay her employer after time-tracking software found that she was misrepresenting the hours she worked.
The Guardian reports that Karlee Besse, a Canadian woman, was found by a court to have lied about the number of hours she had worked based on spyware that tracked her activities, and was consequently ordered to pay her former employer, Reach CPA, for “time theft.” Besse, a British Columbian accountant who worked remotely, was fired from her position last year....
...Besse’s work laptop had “TimeCamp” employee tracking software installed to track the hours...
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Cool. Normally I don’t like spyware, but I like slacker “remote workers” even less.
Maybe she was working on another device or using pencil and paper to add up numbers. It will be interesting to find out if there’s a counter-claim made or no comment. If I’m just sitting in a chair thinking about a problem and I solve it, then computer tracking would have no idea that had happened.
A lot of accountancy work is finding mistakes and reasons for them in less professional book-keeping at source. I am not an accountant but I do research, and I recently found mistakes in a data base entirely by accident, I had created a table of extremes from the data base and was quality controlling the table when I found a lot of errors all on the 19th of various months. Then I discovered that these were not my errors, but errors made at source when the data provider changed format and apparently scanned tables at an imperfect angle on a scanner, dropping off all the first digits of a second row of data that started on the 19th.
It was a table of rainfall amounts so any that were in two digits lost their first digit, all the others (99% of them) had one digit and didn’t lose that second digit. But of course most of the record values were the ones with two digits (like 35 mm instead of 5 mm). The data provider (the UK Met Office) has acknowledged the systematic error in their data base and fixed it after I reported it to them.
But if I were billing them, the time spent thinking about the problem was not at all traceable on any computer.
And this is exactly why you should not be an hourly employee.
Things like this should be billed based on results. Expertise as they say.
Not all services should be billed as hourly, but we live in a culture that adheres to the ‘time is money’ philosophy.
I was paid to write a 40,000 word book against a deadline. The client did not care if I spent 1 hour a day or 23 hours a day writing. I was not paid by the hours spent writing, but by the product produced.
Indeed. Slackers should be held to account. Setting up mouse jigglers etc. to fool tracking software is criminal.
A 40K book? For the average non professional, that is a staggeringly high amount of writing. It sounds equivalent to a 10 volume set of physical books. You must have a lot of experience to accept such a job.
I would guess that took a few years to get done.
More like a modest paperback—between a quarter and a third of the New Testament.
THe rule of thumb in college writing is roughly 250 words/page for an essay-—so 40,000 words is the equivalent of about a 160 page essay—which (although this varies by field) would be longer than a Master’s THesis but shorter than a Doctoral Thesis.
For someone who writes, 160 pages isn’t actually a great deal—and if one knows a field well, good writing involves condensing what one would originally express in 640 pages down to 160 pages while improving on clarity and refining content while loosing nothing of importance. An extremely good writer can begin with something much shorter.
If one is Dickens, plough ahead.
In fiction, a novel is typically 60,000 to 100,000 words long.
40,000 words is condidered novella length.
LOL... no it is not a 10 volume set.
10 Chapters maybe. But 40K is about 130-140 pages.
Most authors write anywhere from 800-1000+ words per day. A book of this length should take 6-8 weeks to write without editing.
I work remotely and am paid for results. When I am sleeping I dream about work problems, but I do not bill my employer extra for my sleeping time.
I suppose that number can sound more intimidating than it is.
160 pages? I could do that.
I would pick a familiar topic.
Why CRT is bad for individuals, schools and the business world?
What happened in November 2020, and how that changed my perception of America?
Why I miss having a Dog in the house?
You sound like one of my lawyers.
When he went to the crapper, if he even thought about me, he billed me.
The one way that working remote makes financial sense to the employer is if the job is commission based, your compensation is only due to your sales.
If you are a jerk off, and don't work or don't succeed, you don't get paid.
When I worked for the Census Bureau in 2020 I had to submit daily time cards...on the laptop they gave me...and I knew that there were at least a few ways that they could tell if they were legit. I never went to an office...I received assignments on that laptop and I completed my work on it.At the end of each day I transmitted my work via a VPN network they had.
Oh that would be a great book based on the title. It could be a personal story or a series of personal interviews.
Dickens motto.......never write just 100 words when you can write 800
Dickenson was paid by the word. Now publishers pay by the written book.
The intimidating part is committing to the actual writing.
While 800-1000 words per day doesn’t sound like much, it is actually a pretty good clip. One can do that with a good topical outline or plot outline.
I had a topical outline down to approximately how many words per topic.
Maybe they should look into the Chicago school teachers
That’s why you need the chip.
Then they could see you were actually thinking about a work problem and not thinking about going fishing this weekend.
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