Time theft

Time theft is a common framing employers use to describe the gap between actual worked time and recorded paid time. Most studies put the per-worker impact at small but non-trivial dollar amounts over a year.

Common forms:

• Buddy punching (one worker clocks in for another)
• Long or extra breaks not subtracted from paid time
• Inflated start times ("I got here at 8:30" when actually 8:45)
• Late clock-out (clocking out at 5:00 from the parking lot when you actually left the building at 4:50)

The aggressive response is verification: PIN entry on punch, photo capture, geo-fencing, biometric scanning. The mild response is auditing: review summaries, anomaly detection, flagging implausibly long shifts.

The framing assumes an adversarial worker-employer relationship, which fits some industries and not others. Volunteer programs and trust-based small teams typically don't apply the time-theft frame because the underlying relationship is collaborative.