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Be an amateur detective for me.

tastybasslines

tastybasslines

Inactive
May 9, 2010
2,216
1,384
Los Angeles, CA
#1
We have a client who is owed hundreds of hours of overtime that was never paid while in the employ of a company. The work, which was IT related, was always performed remotely, from his home. The employees of this 200+ employee company were sent a notice that they could contact this person anytime they needed his help. He was the main goto IT guy for any problems an employee might have. Considering the overtime work was always remote, how would you go about proving these hours were worked? You can ask for documents only to prove this and only ones that would be related to him or the company, as it would be impossible to identify and subpoena the records of all 200+ employees. Ideas so far are:

His company cell phone records.
Any IM's
Help desk records/requests.

Any other ideas or ways you think we could prove he was working? @buldog5151bass ?
 
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#3
buzzbass said:
If truely was logged in remotely, the gateway server should have records of his connection time(s)
Click to expand...

This...

And...plenty of people work from home submitting only time sheets as proof. Though for more accurate record keeping, perhaps employees should be submitting work requests that IT guy would enter his man hours onto rather than just calling him.
 
#7
Depending on how long this was, a lot of the default records in the system could be gone. Emails and phone records are a start to at least establish that he was contacted on particular dates. Any access method he had (say RDC, citrix, VPN etc) logs would also be worth looking through. If he used something like LogMeIn to assist in troubleshooting, that might be another data point. There is likely billable work from non-incident related hours though such as routine maintenance (usually done off hours on evenings or weekends).
 
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#11
We use an offsite IT service company. Any employee requests at their HD require opening a ticket. That includes documenting the issue, the fix, the time required, follow through if any and closing the ticket with a total of time spent that is billable to the program contract. Off hours maintenance jobs also are associated with a ticket. No ticky, no laundry.

Server event logs, if available should shed some light on it, if they can be filtered to only his workstation.
 
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#14
How did he access the company remotely? VPN? If so, then the VPN Concentrator should have logs of all the times he logged in remotely. Also, if they use external authentication for the VPN (SecurID tokens or Active Directory), then there should also be logs of his all his authentications. In fact, if they do Active Directory, or any other centralized authentication (NIS, LDAP, etc), then that should be able to prove when he was accessing any company related assets.

If they don't use VPN and don't use any centralized authentication system, then you would have to look at the logs at whatever individual systems he was accessing while working.
 
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#17
While I assume this is related to the hernia issue, it is a FLSA issue as well. Is Wage & Hour conducting a concurrent investigation into this? It's a tricky situation, because you could ask for documents that show a policy of him being on-call if you're doing an investigation or you're in discovery, but you need to do some sleuthing to show that he was actually working during those times. If he was remotely accessing people's computers, as has been stated, it would stand to reason that there is time logged for that. You may be able to subpoena phone records too.

Of course, the respondent is most likely going to claim that he is an exempt employee.

P.s. Just saw that downunder said this could be for remedy. If that's the case, then I can see why W&H isn't doing the investigation.
 
#19
Agree if he logged on to the system remotely there will be times he logged and and logged off however that is not going to prove he was actually working he could log into your system and go out and lay by the pool after fixing something at took minutes to fix. If you thought you saw something was a miss you should have had the employee monitor the time it took when someone is logged on remotely they take over your desktop and control your mouse if they see no activity on their desktop they could have called him on it. I am very busy at the office and anytime IT comes into my machine and I see nothing moving I text them to find out if they are done. This is after the fact so I don't see anything other than learning something from this and put something in place to monitor it some way and it seems like a trust issue you have here so I'd let him go.
 

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