Feds drop $4 million on new clocks, still can’t keep track of time

You would figure clocks wouldn’t be too hard to figure out, they’ve only been around since antiquity. Sadly for our government, that’s not the case.

From the Washington Examiner:

U.S. Department of Agriculture officials spent $4 million on a revolutionary workplace innovation this year: a clock that measures time worked in one-minute increments.

The Food Safety and Inspection Service uses an “outdated” payroll system that measures employees’ hours in 15-minute increments, meaning FSIS doesn’t know exactly how long its employees actually work, according to a recent report by the USDA inspector General.

FSIS in turn may be charging slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants for time inspectors never worked.

Between the inaccurate time clocks and a payroll process that requires hours to be entered manually each pay period into two different systems, FSIS’s payroll and billing is a tangled mess. The discrepancy between the two systems meant FSIS incorrectly charged slaughterhouses for millions of dollars for overtime in 2011 and 2012, according to the IG.

Timecards are also pretty low-tech devices, but apparently they too are more than the feds can handle. Who spends $4 million upgrading a time-card system only to still have no idea how many hours employees are working? Your government, that’s who.