Human Resource Blog

Vermont Attendance and Tardiness

	Attendance Management
Vacation Request / Response Form Weekly Time Sheets Attendance Calendar for 2008, 2009, or 2010 Annual Attendance Tracker Vacation Request Form for 2008, 2009, 2010 (Calendar) Detailed Absence Report

	Compensation
Employee Payroll Action Form W-4 Employee Withholding Allowance Cert. Employee Payroll Status/Change Form Direct Deposit Form Total Compensation Summary

In Vermont, if an employee forgets to clock in, can the employer dock his pay?

Some employees have been known to conceal their repeated tardiness by “forgetting” to clock in, but employers have some options.

The law is strict. It is not permissible to pay an employee for time worked. The employer must, therefore, have some means of determining what time the employee started working. Some possibilities are asking co-workers what time he or she came to work. Sometimes computer login times or cash register records will reveal when an employee began working on a given day.

Beyond that “detective” strategy, what can employer do? It is important to realize that failing to clock in can be a performance issue. Employees could be disciplined for repeatedly not punching in.

The first step is to establish a policy on the matter and post it in the form of a written memo somewhere obvious. This insures that the new policy is known by all workers.

Next, employees could receive verbal warnings for the first violation of the new policy. Written reprimands could follow. After 3 reprimands, the employer could either terminate the worker or suspend him or her for 1 to 3 days without pay. Termination could follow the 4^th warning.

Employers, in short, should not even think about docking an employee’s pay for forgetting to clock in. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of the federal government makes it a requirement that employees be paid for all the time they work. The U.S. Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division enforces the policy very closely, and violations can result in fines of more than $10,000 along with back pay.

Vermont law makes it illegal as well, under its minimum wage law. Almost every other state follows this practice also.

There is another danger. If a worker had put in more than 40 hours in a week, docking that employee even a quarter of an hour could be a serious violation of both federal and state overtime laws.

To repeat the warning, if an employer docks a worker’s pay under these circumstances, it is the employer who will ultimately be in trouble. JH