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What is perceived by you as less moral - stealing food products from the neighborhood supermarket or falsely reporting work hours?
And what about stealing an item of clothing from a branch of a fashion chain?
Does this action constitute a more serious offense in terms of values, compared to 'stealing hours' from the employer?
Well, according to the data of a recent survey on the subject, false reporting of working hours, or in other words - receiving wages for hours when the employee did not work - is perceived by the public in Israel as a minor offense.
From a recent survey conducted by the Employers' Forum, among 913 respondents, aged 18-45, it appears that 75.6% believe that 'stealing hours' is at the lowest level of theft offenses, far from the negative value attributed to the theft of an actual product from such a business or Other.
The employee's false reporting of more working hours than those actually worked is a very common global phenomenon. According to a study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the largest organization in the US, this method of theft creates losses for employers in the amount of billions of dollars Every year. It also turns out that companies with more than 100 employees are 4 times more likely to pay wages for false work to employees, compared to companies that employ up to 10 employees.
You can't bluff when you sign a watch physically, but from a distance - you can also allow/ShutterStock
stealing hours?
They also steal other things
In general, employee embezzlement of its various types, cumulatively creates damages that reach a monstrous amount of approximately 4.7 trillion dollars a year.
The figure taken from the biannual study of the World Bureau of Embezzlement Examiners joins another figure, which should resonate well with every employer - an average organization or business loses about 5% of its income per year due to embezzlement and financial irregularities.
The exact prevalence of 'hours theft' is not known, but all the experts in the field of fraud research with whom we spoke say that it is a very painful blow for employers.
"Many organizations suffer from this, it is a clear violation of the law that is being committed and it is very common. It is likely that an employee who commits it makes more cuts and cuts corners in other activities as well," notes senior criminologist Shlomi Ader, who in the past served as director of the security department in a long line of large companies in the economy .
According to him, this is antisocial behavior par excellence, which according to the Israeli law book also constitutes a serious criminal offense: Section 391 of the Penal Code states that "an employee steals something that is property of his employer, or that came into the hands of the employee on behalf of his employer, and the value of which exceeds one thousand new shekels , his sentence - imprisonment for seven years".
But the law is separate, and the reality is separate: the reality shows that more than once, even in serious cases where evidence has accumulated against an employee who reported 'hours theft' amounting to hundreds of thousands of shekels, the courts are satisfied with a light punishment and in quite a few cases, no indictment is filed at all and the case is closed for reasons Various.
Thus, for example, a few months ago a verdict was given in the case of an employee who admitted that she falsely reported working hours and received an excess salary in the amount of about a quarter of a million shekels.
Despite the evidentiary infrastructure, the police closed the case on the grounds of a lack of evidence and in a civil proceeding they were ordered to return to the employer's coffers an amount of approximately NIS 220,000.
"The Israeli police have priorities and even more serious embezzlements are not always investigated in depth, so it's easy, in the case of theft of hours," the investigation and intelligence company "Ari Hakirok" points out, "in most cases, even though it is theft on a large scale, the employer does not file a complaint with the police at all , so that the picture of the criminal situation that is reflected through the statistics found in the Israel Police, is completely distorted and dramatically smaller than the actual reality."
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And what about the legal consequences on the work relationship between the employer and the employee?
"Even in cases where it has been proven that the employee stole hours on a large scale, the likelihood that the court will allow a complete denial of all severance compensation is extremely small," notes attorney Hila Aharoni, an expert in labor law. According to her, compensation can only be denied by submitting an application to the labor court According to Section 16 or 17 of the Law on Severance Compensation and to receive a ruling that allows denial. "Negation of compensation without a ruling allowing it, poses a risk to the employer: it was and will become clear that he does not have evidence that amounts to a solid factual foundation that proves the very nature of the embezzlement, as well as that it caused significant damage to the organization - The court can order him to pay an additional amount, beyond the severance compensation that he will have to pay the employee."
Alongside all this, it should be pointed out: in recent years, there has been a steep increase in the number of employers who have installed fingerprint-based biometric attendance clocks in their businesses, which has significantly reduced the scope of the phenomenon "In the past, it was very easy to mislead the employer - an employee would leave the workplace a few hours before the end of the shift, and ask his friend to sign the clock in his place.
Today, biometric technology has significantly reduced the ability to do this and has ruled out any possibility, when it comes to a biometric facial recognition watch," notes Ekotz Systems, one of the largest companies in Israel in the field of attendance watches. In light of the recent increase in the use of biometric means, the Authority for the Protection of Privacy issued a document regulating the manner the use
So what can be done?
So where is the phenomenon of stealing hours very common?
First, among businesses and organizations that still use old signing methods that do not include identification technology.
Second, among workers employed in the field.
Haim Molcho, CEO of Okatz explains: "In recent years, many of them have been equipped with an application that allows them to sign attendance from their phone, without the need to put their finger or scan their facial features with an attendance clock that is placed in one place or another."
The fraud is very easy to commit: say that the employee has to report to some site at nine o'clock in the morning, but since those applications do not include a location function, he can clock in at seven o'clock in the morning, while at home, which creates a false situation as if he worked overtime. Examples of such frauds abound: for example, before About a week ago, a guy who worked in the field as a system implementer was fired after it became clear to his employer that he had stolen hundreds of hours of work in this way over the past two years. In another case, which was discovered about a month ago, a technician employed by a company that installs communications infrastructure admitted that he falsely reported dozens of hours of work during the two months he worked for it.
And what is the solution? How can employers reduce the possibility of hours being stolen? It must be made clear to employees that accurate attendance reporting is a cornerstone of the trust given to them and that violating it is a serious action, with all that implies. Secondly, there are currently location-based applications that allow the employer to know Exactly where each of his field personnel is, starting from the moment of reporting the presence, as well as allowing the employee to sign attendance, only within a certain radius, which the employer determined.
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