Payroll Fraud

Employee monitoring may reveal not only unproductive employees or data leakages. Sometimes, it can bring to light unbelievable financial frauds inside the company.

An insurance company opened a new office in San Antonio and appointed William as its head. William was a young and ambitious manager who showed amazing results in his work, and the leading position in the new office was a promotion opportunity for him.

William took up work with great enthusiasm and responsibility. Under his leadership, the new office showed stable growth, and the staff increased to eight employees.

However, the growth rate slowed in ten months. William reported that the number of clients was increasing, and the staff could not manage the workload. He asked to hire three more employees and received approval. However, it did not change the situation - eleven employees did not bring much more revenue than eight. William assured that those were temporary difficulties, the business would pick up soon - but he needed to hire two more employees.

At that point, the executives got interested in the work of the San Antonio office. They suspected that the employees were not as productive as William's reports said. Perhaps, instead of expanding the team, the manager could encourage more productivity in the current working staff. The head office reached out to CleverControl to implement the employee monitoring system in their underperforming branch and see how it could help boost performance.

CleverControl's monitoring over a month showed that idleness and absence of discipline were not the problems in the office. Quite the reverse, statistics indicated that the employees were constantly overworking, sometimes staying in the office until 10 pm, trying to keep up with the tasks William set. Such a workload already had a negative impact on the employees' morale and performance. For example, after weeks of crunches, one of the best employees showed clear signs of burnout. Logs indicated that his daily contribution sometimes consisted of only a couple of emails to clients or a few lines of text. According to screen recordings, he was mindlessly switching between work-related tabs in the browser and work chats for the rest of the time.

From William's point of view, the staff was not doing enough. He kept setting higher goals and reprimanded employees by email. His often rude appeals were also captured by CleverControl.Eleven employees would have a chance to keep up with William's pace. If there were eleven employees working in the office.

William seemed not to pay much attention to the new software, thinking it was an antivirus or some security program. Only nine computers connected to the monitoring dashboard within a week after the IT specialist from the head office sent out the CleverControl installation links to the San Antonio office. The specialist called the office to inquire if all the employees had installed the agent and received confirmation. However, the two missing computers did not join the monitoring dashboard either in a week or a month. The visit to the San Antonio office confirmed the company's worst suspicions: those two employees existed only in payroll records. An internal investigation revealed that William "hired" fake employees and embezzled their salaries.

William was fired, and the work of the San Antonio office was reorganized.

• Online dashboard

  CleverControl showed there were fewer employees in the office than the payroll records stated.
• Active time statistics

  Monitoring employees' work time revealed that the staff was overworking.
• Recording user's actions

  Tracking employees' work indicated that employees treated their duties responsibly, but their workload was too high.