What? When I was working, I made sure to take all my vacation time. And when I was unemployed, I made sure to take all my unemployment benefit before returning to the work force.
intercst
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In the Federal Government and at AT&T if a person loses vacation time it reflects poorly on their manager.
I many ways, paid time off is a way of uncovering fraud and embezzlement.
Cheers
Qazulight
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Many times, I wasn’t allowed to use the vacation time I supposedly had earned. The most infuriating incident was one summer, at OD, where I was busting my rear covering the vacations of everyone else in the department. Come September, everyone else was back from vacation, their spawn back in school, no backlog of work to clear. I put in a vacation request. Denied. No reason. I was simply told I had to stay and work.
I got tagged for jury duty while working in the OD store. Of course, I asked who would cover for me. The store manager said "you will probably be out of there by 2 or 3, so you can come in and do your day’s work after that. (my normal workday was from 11am to 8pm)
At WPI, I got, iirc, three days off in 2000. Didn’t get another day off for the next five years. One time, I was ordered to participate in a workshop Steelcase held to improve their product recall process. My first question “who will cover for me?” I was assured everything would be covered. I returned to the office three days later to discover their concept of “coverage”: have someone print out e-mails, and take phone messages, and pile everything up on my desk for me to take care of when I got back.
People don’t take vacations because they aren’t allowed to. There is no union to back them up, and the “JCs” only care about beating more work out of them.
Steve
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Back in the day when I was a CFO, I required everyone to take 2 consecutive weeks of vacation every year. I did this for two reasons.
If someone is playing financial games, it will usually be exposed over a 2 week absence. In fact, even further back in my internal audit days, anyone not taking 2 weeks of vacation was considered a red flag. Obviously, time has passed me by.
Second, if someone was out of the office for 2 weeks and no one missed them, why did they have a job?
Strangely, when I came back from my 2 week vacations and started to talk about how great my vacation was, everyone made a point of telling me they didn’t realize I was on vacation.
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Yes indeed. You may have uncovered fraud with your strategy. By preventing people taking vacation, you certainly beat them out of two week’s pay.
Steve
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I was told that once too. I replied I was going. The only thing left to discuss was did they want me to return as scheduled. I would be fine if I had to look for new employment.
I returned and was never threatened again.
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Um, I don’t think so. The pay is the same but you get 2 more weeks of productivity out of them for the same pay.
Unless, of course, your workers subscribe to the “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” theory.
That’s a good story, and I’m sure it’s sometimes true. But in general, if you don’t have controls that can catch ongoing fraud, then you don’t have adequate controls. A person committing ongoing fraud could (would!) be smart enough to take all their days off, but only one or two at a time, so they can make sure they are back in the office quick enough to keep the cover going for the ongoing fraud.
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In the bank I used to work at there was a requirement to take two weeks leave over a month end.
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Many small businesses and non-profits usually don’t have enough staff to implement adequate controls. Makes more work for the CFO.
A day here and a day there is a red flag. Thats why I always required 2 consecutive weeks off.
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If an hourly person takes time off, someone else works more hours to get the work done. If all the work gets done, without paying any OT, when one person is out, the department is overstaffed.
Steve
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It’s especially important for small businesses to have some sort of controls verifying even long-term trusted employees. And, yes, that means that the CFO has to validate a lot of stuff the bookkeeper does, and it means that the CEO has to validate a lot of stuff the CFO approves, and that the owner(s) have to validate a lot of stuff the folks managing their business do (sometimes, in very small businesses, the owner and CEO are the same). All on a regular basis.
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Ah, good point. I was thinking salaried staff.
However, my experience with hourly employees was as follows. Staffing for hourly employees is not done on a slope (1 person, then 1.1 person, then 1.2) but rather steps, where each step represents (usually) 1 person. Part science, part art.
We would always hire enough hourly staff to cover vacation, sick time, training, personal days, etc. When someone was on vacation, the rest of the staff would absorb some component of the vacationing staff’s key tasks (which also allowed for cross-training, a valuable thing to do). We usually avoided OT.
Again, just my experience.
Regulators have thought of that. When I was getting my MBA, one of my classmates was a loan officer at a New York bank. He explained that banking regulations require that every employee had to take a consecutive 2 weeks off. And they weren’t permitted to come into the office during that 2 week period to “check up on things”, either.
intercst
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My experience is staff on hand starts working over time, until the existing staff is working so much OT it is cheaper to add more staff. One person goes on vacation, or medical, the remaining staff works OT. A continuing issue in UAW contract negotiations, for as long as I can remember, is “mandatory overtime”. The “JCs” want more cars, the line workers are required to work OT, whether they want to or not.
Salaried people are an open invitation for OT hours, without OT pay. The head of cost accounting at the pump seal company was grousing about being put on salary, and so loaded with work he had to work over 40/wk, without OT pay. The scheduling guy at the Steelcase dealership was on salary, so his workload consistently required over 40 hrs/wk. Biggest laff I have had for years, was the sign at a local Burger King “salaried managers wanted”. I bet those “salaried” managers were working 60+ hrs/wk, and spent most of their time flipping burgers, just like the hourly staff.
Radio Shack settled multiple suits for unpaid OT. RS claimed it’s store managers were exempt from OT rules, but store managers were management in name only, with no authority, no discretion, and spent most of their time split between working the sales floor, and unloading freight.
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One of those controls is making sure anyone involved with finances takes their vacation in large lumps, not a day here and a day there.
–Peter
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Yes, that is a very smart tactic in the fight against fraud. Especially if you require their vacation to span a “period” (either end of month, or preferably end of quarter).
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And it is nothing new. My wife worked at a bank back in the '70s and she had to take her two weeks of vacation in one lump.
DB2
Exactly. Once again, the oft-maligned accountants have known things like this for decades. Yet too many people dismiss us as “bean counters.”
–Peter
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DW is retiring NEXT THURSDAY! Her actual last day is June 30, but she is taking her last days of vacation from June 9 - 30. But - she has accrued over 130 days of sick time which she will forfeit. That’s a large current liability that her employer will be reclaiming.
'38Packard
1 Like