You clock in with your badge at the start of a shift and out at the end, and payroll pays the hours between. One badge clocks out every morning at six. It never clocks in. The system, which should reject an out with no in, pays a full shift to a name, and the name has a bank account, and the money is drawn, and the address on the file is a field outside a village forty miles away.
I am the payroll and time administrator at a warehouse with six hundred people on three shifts, and I am the only one who reads the clockings.
The machine.
A reader by the turnstile. Badge in, badge out, and the hours between go to payroll on a Friday. A badge that clocks out without having clocked in is an exception, and the system lists exceptions for me to sort out on a Monday, and there are usually forty, and they are usually people who forgot.
One is not.
The badge.
Every morning at six, to the minute, a badge clocks out. It is never on the in list. It is never on the exception list either, which it should be, because the system has paired it with an in that is not in the database, at ten the previous night, and paid the eight hours.
The name on the badge is a man's. The employee record is complete. Start date 2003. Address, bank, emergency contact, next of kin, all filled in. Nobody on the floor knows him. No supervisor has him on a shift. His badge photo is a man in his forties in the old uniform, looking slightly to the left, the way everybody did in those photos because the camera was next to the door.
The money goes every Friday. It is drawn, from a branch in a town forty miles away, in cash, on a Saturday morning.
What has been checked.
The reader, replaced. It clocks him out.
The record. HR has no file for him. Payroll has. The two systems were merged in 2010 and HR's side of him did not come across and payroll's did, and payroll's has been paying him since 2003, and nobody has noticed in twenty three years because he has never been late, never been sick, never claimed a day's holiday, and has never once clocked in.
The address. I drove to it. It is a field. A gate, a hedge, grass, and at the far side of the field a place where the grass is a different colour in a rectangle, which the farmer, when I found him, said was where a caravan had been for a long time, and then had not.
The farmer.
He said a man had lived in the caravan. Worked nights somewhere, drove off at nine in the evening and came back at seven in the morning and slept. Kept himself to himself. Paid the farmer in cash for the pitch, on a Saturday. And had, one winter, not come back in the morning, and the caravan had stood there for a year, and the farmer had moved it, and the rent, he said, had carried on.
I asked him what he meant. He said the money. An envelope, in the box on the gate, every Saturday, cash, the pitch rent, for a caravan that was not there, for, he reckoned, about twenty years, and he had stopped opening them, and they were in a drawer.
The bank.
I rang the branch. I could not get far, but I got far enough. The account is drawn in person, on a Saturday, by the account holder, who is known to the cashiers, who comes in at nine when they open, who is a quiet man in his forties in a work jacket who does not say much and looks slightly to the left.
What is done about it.
I have not reported it. I have sat with the exception for a month. Payroll fraud is a thing I am supposed to report and a man being paid for a shift nobody sees him work is the definition of it, and I have the form, and I have not filled it in, because the one thing I am sure of is that he is working the shift.
What I do.
I run the clock.
I went in at ten one night and stood by the turnstile. At ten the reader beeped, an in, and the turnstile arm went round, on its own, the quarter turn it does for a person, and the badge number on the reader's little screen was his, and the in, when I looked in the morning, was not in the database, and the out was, at six.
He is here. From ten to six, every night, for twenty three years, somewhere in four hundred thousand square feet, doing whatever it was he did, and nobody has told him he can stop, because nobody knows he is here except the machine, and the machine pays him, and he pays his rent, and he is, by every record this building keeps, the best employee it has.
I have put him down for a long service award. Twenty years. It is a clock, which I thought he would understand. It will be presented at the Christmas do, and I have put his name on the list, and when they call it and nobody comes up I will go and get it for him, and I will leave it by the turnstile at six, and I think he will take it, and I think he will carry on, and I think that is what he wants, and it is not my job to want otherwise.