We have a couple of sales reps who pad their mileage – drive aimlessly about, do personal errands, etc. – and charge it to the company. I expect this is a fairly common practice, since the management can’t watch what they are doing all the time, but IMO this is stealing from the company.
I have a manager who spends a great deal of her time yapping on the phone to her friends and relatives and taking 2 hour lunches. Again, IMO, that is stealing from the company’s time. I’m not trying to sound sanctimonious, but the company is paying you to work during X hours, not have an hour conversation with your daughter.
Oh, and manager also complains that she has to work on weekends to get anything done. It’s all I can do to not scream “If you actually WORKED during the week, you wouldn’t have to do that!”
This practice has been mentioned before on the Board. I don’t know how common it is, but it’s certainly unethical, IMO.
I work in private law firms. At one of my previous firms, one of the name partners reassigned the time billed by paralegals to himself, so that clients who were paying out big bucks for what they thought was a prestigious name partner were actually paying for paralegal work. The paralegal’s billing rate was only about a quarter as much as the partner’s. There’s an industry name for this practice which I’m not remembering at the moment. The partner was always in and always working, so I don’t see how double-billing wasn’t also being perpetrated as well.
[QUOTE=Pochacco]
As an employee of Sony I was given the opportunity to buy a PS3 before Christmas through internal channels so I could get one without having to camp out for it. However, the offer specified that we were forbidden from buying one and reselling it.
[/QUOTE]
That isn’t an “unfair” advantage though, that’s a perk. There is a distinction. Also, the person I was speaking of did go sell the things and made a huge profit. You only were able to buy one, correct? It is implied that others bought more than one of the item(s), in order to make lots of profit.
[QUOTE=Muriel]
It’s funny because it’s similar to the X-Boxes or whatever they were selling a week or so again. EVERYONE they interviewed (they had been standing in line, some for almost two days) said they would sell the games station on eBay and then take the profits and buy the X-Box (or whatever) when it comes down to normal price.
[/QUOTE]
No, it’s not. If the employee had stood in line with the rest of the nuts and used his employee discount then, that’s one thing. This employee was helping himself to the items before they were available to customers, effectively “cutting in line.”
We had an employee who got her real estate license, put a contract on a condo, and left two weeks before her closing. She then went to the closing, picked up the commission check, added her last name to the front of it, signed the back with our endorsement, and put it into her account.
She lost her real estate license, had to answer to the police, and was sued by the attorney (never fuck with anyone’s escrow account). Since half of the check was hers anyway, she did it all for $1500.
[QUOTE=teela brown]
<snip>There’s an industry name for this practice which I’m not remembering at the moment. The partner was always in and always working, so I don’t see how double-billing wasn’t also being perpetrated as well.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know what the industry name would be, but in my world that’s known as “fraud.” I think a strong argument could also be made for “theft.”
I think that was an invaluable experience for you, Count Blucher. Now you know what kind of company your’e working for (if you didn’t already).
You only were able to buy one, correct? It is implied that others bought more than one of the item(s), in order to make lots of profit.