While working from home, most tend to check their phones or get up to let the dog out, but one Canadian accountant is in warm water after she lied about how many hours she was working while remote. Now, she has been ordered to pay her company back for the “time theft.”
Karlee Besse was an employee for the Vancouver Island accounting firm Reach CPA. She was released from her possession after the firm said she was stealing company time, according to court documents.
While Besse filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the company, claiming they still owed her $5,000 in unpaid wages. Reach CPA filed a countersuit seeking $2,600 in wages it paid her while she allegedly wasn’t working and part of an advance she received before her employment started.
The court looked at the case, which included tracking software from the company that showed she was performing personal tasks while claiming to be working, and ruled in favor of the company, ordering Besse to pay back the money, court documents show.
The ruling is one of the first instances where tracking software was used to order a worker to pay back an employer because they were not working while claiming to be.
In February of 2022 Besse had a meeting with her manager about ways to improve her work performance and productivity. One of the solutions reached included installing a time-tracking software called TimeCamp on her work-issued laptop.
A month after the meeting, the company found through the software that she was not on schedule for her work and that there were discrepancies from how she was tracking her time worked and what the software found she had actually worked.
The software found that for 51 hours logged by Besse on her timesheet, she was doing tasks unrelated to work from February 22 to March 25.
TimeCamp videos of Besse’s screen proved that she had engaged in time theft, resulting in the ruling being handed down. However, Besse claimed that she had printed the documents and was working on them by hand, though she never informed her employers of this, the court documents say.
Reach CPA says that she could not have printed the large volume of documents required for her to complete her work related tasks. The company also noted that her printer activity was limited.
The final ruling from the court dismissed her claim and ordered that she repay Reach $1,506.34.
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