A recent decision posted by the BC Civil Resolution Tribunal could almost be a low-budget spy movie after Sandhar Trucking Ltd. used its GPS tracking system to try and prove that a former employee falsified their time sheets.
Sandhar Trucking Ltd. filed a lawsuit against Gurmeet Sandhu after noticing discrepancies in his timesheets for when he punched in and out of the yard where the company parks its trucks. After some calculations, the company claimed that the former employee documented 153.5 hours more than he actually worked. So they sued for time theft.
According to the court, time theft is a difficult issue to quantify. The general understanding is that it includes when employees report to work but don’t actually start until later or if they leave earlier. At its extreme, it could even involve discussing non-related work topics during working hours. Yikes.
Sandhar used the former definition. According to court documents, a company dispatcher noticed irregularities in Sandhu’s start and end times in October 2022. They notified him that he would not be paid for the additional hours and that any further incidents would result in “immediate termination.” Instead, Sandhu resigned on November 3.
But Sandhu’s resignation wasn’t the end of the time theft battle.
Using his applicable hourly wage, Sandhar sued Sandhu for $4,205.43 for the hours the company calculated he punched in but didn’t actually work. The company then took extreme measures to prove its claim, turning to the GPS tracking systems in its trucks.
Sandhar explained to the court, using documents from Samsara, that it uses a GPS tracking system in its trucks that documents when each truck is turned on and off at each location. It shared that it used the Samsara start and end times of Sandhu’s trucks and compared them to the start and end times on his timesheets to calculate the time theft.
Unfortunately for the company, the court recognized that this method was deeply flawed.
Sandhu denied the time theft allegations and shared that “the Samsara reports do not capture his start and end times because his employment duties included not only driving trucks but also loading flatbeds, assisting other drivers, and counting and inspecting containers in the yard.”
There were also issues in the company’s time theft calculations with rounding differences in the times submitted. The documents showed that Sandhar rounded down in Sandhu’s timesheets when it should have rounded up, along with some other unexplained calculation errors.
Suspicious.
The court ultimately decided that the errors and discrepancies in how the trucking company calculated its alleged time theft could actually “facilitate employer wage theft,” and they decided to dispute its claim.