Here at Time and Attendance Midlands, we often insist that using paper timesheets leaves employers open to inaccuracy and even outright fraud from their employees. The George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust has learnt this the hard way.

 

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An auxiliary nurse named Harbans Dhaliwal at the George Eliot Hospital in Nuneaton submitted timesheets every month with how much she had worked, as requested. 

 

However, in January 2016, a discrepancy in her timesheet was noticed. Upon questioning, she admitted that there might be three months of mistakes. 

An investigation discovered that between April 2014 and December 2015 (19 months), she claimed to have worked 242 shifts when in fact she had worked just ten.

 

She had obtained £49,878, which, the hospital’s director of finance pointed out, was enough to pay a staff nurse’s salary for a year and five months.

Judge Sylvia de Bertodano said: “It is extraordinary that it’s so easy for an employee to make such false claims.”

 

When Dhaliwal was arrested she denied the fraud and told the police she had been confused and thought she had been filling in a sheet saying when she was available to work.

 

She said she never opened her pay cheques, and they were paid into a joint bank account she had with her husband, who was said to have been abusive, to which she did not have access.

 

But after later changing her plea to guilty, Dhaliwal of Cross Road, Foleshill, Coventry, was sentenced to two years in prison suspended for 12 months.

Sentencing Dhaliwal, Judge de Bertodano told her: “Two-and-a-half years ago it became clear that you, for some time, had been claiming for hours you had not worked.

 

“You had claimed almost £50,000 to which you were not entitled. That money came from the NHS, which is an institution of which British people are rightly proud and very protective.

 

“It is under threat through policy and through spending crises, so when money is stolen from it, it is a very serious offence indeed.

 

“But it is quite clear from what I have read that you spent many, many years in an abusive relationship, both physically and emotionally.

 

“It was your husband who had control of the family finances and of the account into which this money went. I accept you have not benefited personally at all from this offending.

 

“I have no hesitation in saying you were not the main decision-maker for your family, and I have no difficulty in accepting the basis of plea that you were effectively doing this under direction.”

 

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If the George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust had been using a clocking terminal, then this astounding and sad fraud could not have taken place. The hospital told the BBC that they had since changed their rota systems, but not which changes they had made. 

 

When an employer uses a clocking terminal to manage their time and attendance, employees must be present and physically clock in. This data is recorded in the central WinTA.NET system. 

 

Using the self-service module, employees can see their own clocking timesheets so misunderstandings about potential hours vs worked hours would not arise. 

 

There are two methods of clocking in and out using the Time and Attendance Midlands management system. 

 

The first is using contactless proximity smart cards. These are about the size of a credit card (55mm x 85mm x 2.2mm) and are thin and flexible enough to be carried in your wallet. 

 

They operate using well-proven and reliable RF (Radio Frequency) reading technology. This gives a consistent read range which is unaffected by most external conditions, and a theoretically infinite lifespan. 

 

The smart card microchip, is a passive device which holds a unique factory encoded ID number that cannot be duplicated, making it very secure indeed. As a smart card enters the reader’s electromagnetic field, it is automatically activated by the field’s energy.

 

The other clocking method is using biometrics. The types that we offer are finger scanners and hand scanners. 

 

Neither of these store prints, as that is an unnecessary use of personal information. In the finger scanner, the print patterns are converted into a code through a secure algorithm, which is then stored on a database for future comparison and authentication. The hand scanner stores the geometry, its size and shape of the hand and uses that to match.

 

Whenever registered users have their fingerprints scanned, a comparison is made between the live fingerprint and the stored fingerprint template and if the two match, the event is saved in the Time and Attendance controller database.