I think it just depends on who you’re working for and who’s taking care of payroll. At my mom and pop store, we’ve never outsourced payroll. Back when we had an actual, traditional punch clock the person doing payroll rounded each day to the nearest quarter hour. When I took over, I rounded each week to the nearest quarter hour. Now, we punch in and out with a badge on a clock that’s connected to my computer and every day is rounded to the nearest hundredth of an hour.
From the employer’s POV, that makes sense, but for the employee, I’m not sure getting paid for an unearned half of a quarter hour is viewed as a risk. In fact, back when we had an old punch clock, I’d see employees, when getting ready to leave, do the math in their head and decide if they wanted to punch out now or wait a few minutes and punch out knowing they’d get paid for an additional 7 minutes.
Anyway, back to the Kronos thing. Since we’ve never outsourced payroll, I don’t know the answer to this, but when people are blaming the businesses that used their services, what could they have done to mitigate this? Or what could they have done to insure employees can continue to get paid and W-2’s go out and everything happens smoothly and on time? ISTM, the more extensive the business’ contingency plan is, the less reason they have to outsource payroll.
And more importantly, how does Kronos not have their database backed up? If that’s true and not just a misunderstanding, I wonder how bad it’s going to hurt them. I’d assume it’s going to put them out of business since people are going to scramble to find other payroll companies to work with and may very well not return to a company that doesn’t back up their data or they’ll put in a “state of the art” system and procedures for backing up that will be impressive enough to bring people back.
In any case, I just can’t fathom why they wouldn’t back up. One possible reason could be that their backups are infected as well. My business has insurance for cyber-attacks. When I was chit chatting with my agent, I mentioned my entire computer is backed up on the fly, plus my payroll/accounting software is backed up each day (in addition to the live back ups) and all off site. He mentioned that something they’ve been seeing more and more of is ransomware that infects a system, but will lie dormant for weeks or months specifically to make sure it can quietly infect your back ups as well.
I’ve always said that, in an extreme emergency, I can throw out my computer, buy a new one and be back to where I left off within a day or two. But if restoring my data from back ups just reinfects the system, I’d be in a bit more trouble.*
*And that’s actually all the reason I need to continue with hard copies, stored in plastic bins for decades, that I needed. I keep telling myself that all these things (ie weekly payroll tax confirmations, tax forms that are submitted online etc etc) that I print out, I should just save the PDF and get rid of all the paper, but this is a great example of why I shouldn’t do that.