I don’t think so. It’s really none of my business to know, but I think this was a case of she is already on the benefit and now she has a job with income and has to fill out paperwork so the govt. can reduce accordingly. I don’t think there was any intent to defraud anyone, as I said the numbers are accurate.
If I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt it’s possible she didn’t ask me until the eleventh hour and I was in another office, but we have fax machines and email.
~Max
Yeesh, that’s a big red flag. Faking your manager’s signature on a form? A stern talking to is called for, right before letting her go.
She has to internalize the idea that forgery and fraud is absolutely forbidden, there are no second chances, no “try to be better next time” because next time could put her in prison with a felony on her record. You are protecting her from what she hasn’t learned through other sources. I learned it in 2nd grade when I forged my mom’s signature on something, and got the stern talking to from Mrs. Brannigan. This employee needs to learn it now.
How bad? Not bad at all if there is no intent to defraud or mislead. Bureaucratic bullshit. What % of all the world’s signatures are rubber-stamped? I’ve gotten rebate cheecks with rubber-stamped signatures.
How ‘new’ a hire is this person? I would likely be more forgiving of a long time employee, taking this overstep than a new hire.
For a new hire to do this seems to border on testing the waters, while maintaining plausible deniability, ‘but everything else on the form was 100% accurate, no funny business, so I just thought…’!
Without the blank prescription pads, I’d be tempted to give them a talking to and insure that henceforth their every signature/form gets double checked.
With that access, I’d have zero tolerance for this. If this person doesn’t understand why, or needs it spelled out in detail, well,
that alone should disqualify them. Clearly their education is incomplete. And the sooner that is corrected the better for their career.
Perhaps point out, you won’t ruin future prospects, or give them a terrible reference, even offer them the chance to quit rather than be fired, as they are young and still have things to learn.
Good Luck!
As an additional thought, if the government follows up on this, and discovers you knew about it but took no action, you could be in for some difficulty.
I think it would be important to me to suss out where this action falls on the “stupid > evil” continuum.
And I can only see getting to that answer by talking to this employee.
Where it fell would inform what action I would take.
But it’s hard to imagine I would do nothing. This strikes me as pretty problematic at best, and potentially quite serious at worst.
Good luck.
I could see a situation where you had refused to, or kept procrastinating on filling it out where, while not legally justified, is understandable.
Do you know who it was filed with? The form is meant for Dept of Children and Families, but I know in Ohio, lots of credit agencies use the same form as ODJFS for verification of income.
This isn’t just stuff for benefits, this is also used for credit. I had an employee that wanted to buy a house, and I had to fill out one of those forms for her. Same with buying cars or getting other forms of loans.
I’ve had several occasions to fill out one of these forms, and it was never presented to me by the employee, but from whatever agency wanted the information. It’s a bit odd, IME, that it bypassed you at all.
I’ve had a few times when they then called to follow up, to make sure that the info was correct and that I filled it out.
If I found an employee that did this, I’d want to hear their side of the story, and why, but I would very strongly be leaning towards terminating their employment. About the only mitigating factor I would accept would be that it was my fault for not filling it in a timely fashion, and that the employee stood to lose out because of that.
With or without the express consent of the person whose signature is being reproduced ?
This is part of why so many here (ETA: including you, obviously) think it’s important to understand what happened and why.
For the wrong employee, there’s a potential moral hazard situation here.
Not waiting because I was unresponsive, and the business was going to lose out is one thing.
Not waiting because I was unresponsive, and the employee was going to lose out, personally, is another.
[How differently they might be treated is, of course, open to individual judgment.]
The latter can quickly become a slippery slope – I wanted a raise, you’ve consistently refused to give me that raise, now I have bills coming due and my car broke down, and …
In a job some years back, I had to manage a significant number of employees (maybe 50). This would have been a massive red flag for me.
I get that the person being discussed here didn’t derive a direct financial benefit from his/her faking of your signature. But still, this should not have happened.
WTF? Sounds like you have a seriously toxic workplace if employees are taking photos of what other employees are doing.
And some ( not nearly all) of those rubber stamped signatures were stamped by the person whose signature it is. I have a rubber stamp of my signature. No one else has ever had permission to use it - I have it because I signed so many documents at a previous job that my signature was unrecognizable by about 11am
Late March.
That made me realize there’s another angle to this, and it’s not pretty.
In Florida, unemployment benefits are intended for employees who are fired through no fault of their own. Both quitting for personal reasons (with limited exceptions) and being fired for misconduct will disqualify one from unemployment benefits.
~Max
As far as I am aware I was never asked. She didn’t show for work today but I’ll be talking with her tomorrow.
~Max
Late March? I wonder if there was a deadline and the worker went up to the last minute and thought, “I have to send this now. No time to get a real signature.” Still wouldn’t excuse it though so I’d fire unless they had a really very extremely good reason.
A coworker asked (out of the blue) if I had changed my signature. I said no, why? and the picture came minutes later along with concerns about fraud.
I’m not going to fault my employees for bringing me pictures when it looks like my signature has been forged. What else can they do, steal the paper itself? Ignore it? If the numbers weren’t right it would be criminal fraud (IMO) but other employees are in no position to verify the numbers.
~Max
You have an employee who faked your signature AND an employee who knows the other employee faked your signature. It’s inevitable that you already have other employees who know what’s going on.
I don’t see how you can’t terminate the offender.
If the employee had signed it then immediately told you themselves, I could see giving a lecture on why they needed better preparation or whatever but because it wasn’t reported then it seems like a showstopper for me.
Said employee has been fired.
~Max