Page 108 - Essentials of Payroll: Management and Accounting

Payr oll Best Practices
integrity flaw: Employees can use each other’s badges to enter and exit
from the payroll system,called “buddy punching.”This means that some
employees could be paid for hours when they were not on-site at all.
A division of Ingersoll-Rand called Recognition Systems has sur-

mounted this problem with the use of biometric time clocks (which
can be seen at www.handreader.com). This reader requires an employee
to place his or her hand on a sensor, which matches its size and shape
to the dimensions already recorded for that person in a central database.
The time entered into the terminal will then be recorded against the
payroll file of the person whose hand was just measured. Thus, only
employees who are on-site can have payroll hours credited to them.

The company sells a variation on the same machine, called the
HandKey, which is used to control access to secure areas.These systems
have a secondary benefit, which is that no one needs an employee
badge or pass key, which tend to be lost or damaged over time, and so
represent a minor headache for the accounting or human resources
staffs, who must track them. In a biometric monitoring environment,
all an employee needs is his or her hand.
These biometric monitoring devices are expensive, however, and
require significant evidence of buddy punching to justify their cost. If

these clocks are intended to replace bar-coded time clocks, then there
is no projected labor savings from reducing the manual labor of the
payroll personnel (since this advantage was already covered by the bar-
coded clocks), leaving only the savings from buddy punching to justify
their purchase.
For this system,too,you will have to address the lack of time-punched
data as noted for the bar-coded time clock.Again, it can be resolved by

meeting with the hourly personnel to show them how their time data
is collected, stored, and summarized, and how to access this information
on the time clock if the device has such data available.

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