Time reporting requirements California

[likinglife]

Our company is currently using a computerized time clock which requires employees to swipe a card to clock in and out. Occassionally an employee forgets to swipe their card at quitting time and the afternoon hours are not logged by the time clock. Frequently the employee must guess this by the amount of his or her paycheck as they are never informed of the cumulative hours they will be paid until payday.
Question one... should an employee have a statement of hours before payday in the event there are discrepencies?
Question two... if there is a discrepency and the employee's immediate supervisor can verify the hours worked, is there any legal way the employer can refuse to pay the un-recorded hours?

[Pattymd]

1. No, there is no legal requirement to do so. The system can be configured so that the supervisor or other approver must correct the time before it is sent to payroll.

2. No. However, see above. This should be corrected before the file is created and passed to payroll, not after.

[likinglife]

Employer refuses to make correction

The problem I'm having is that the company refuses to make any correction in the employee's favor. Several hourly employees have been docked hundreds of dollars just for forgetting to punch in or out. It isn't a habit for them to forget, but it does happen.
Isn't there some publication or something official in writing somewhere that will verify for the company that this is not legal?

[Pattymd]

Not specifically. Except maybe this:
http://www.dol.gov/dol/allcfr/ESA/Ti...9CFR785.11.htm
http://www.dol.gov/dol/allcfr/ESA/Ti...9CFR785.13.htm

Although a bunch of claims to the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement for unpaid wages just might do the trick.
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/di...0&file=500-558

[cbg]

This isn't part of your question, but if I had employees who were consistantly forgetting to swipe in and out, I'd give them one warning and on the second offense I'd suspend them without pay until they learned to remember. If they got to a fourth (maybe a third, depending on how close together the offenses were), they'd be having to remember to send in their unemployment claims instead of swiping in and out.

The employer cannot refuse to pay them, but that doesn't mean the employer is helpless in this matter. There is NO excuse for multiple "forgettings" of this type.