Email

By Greg Bartlett

An employer may suspect an employee of improper behavior or dishonesty in reporting on a timesheet, but proving these suspicions may be more difficult than may appear, especially if the employee works on an off-site location, working from home, on the road, or in a community perhaps. Such was the case with a lieutenant working in a sheriff’s office who was given reason to suspect a sergeant of negligence in fulfilling his responsibilities out in the field. The sergeant had been discovered to have made very little activity on a computer he was to be using off-site and failed to properly document absences from four days of work. Within this context, with the employee working off-site, it was difficult for the lieutenant to prove the sergeant’s faithfulness or neglect in performing his duty. An investigation was undertaken, and permission was granted for a GPS tracking device to be placed on the sergeant’s vehicle without his knowledge.

GPS stands for Global Positioning Systems. Research and development of this global navigation satellite system (GNSS) was begun in the 1940’s – during World War II. The program has been run and maintained by the United States Air Force and is the only fully-functional GNSS in the world today. A GPS navigational device can map out a business professional’s or a vacation goer’s route in a matter of a few minutes. A GPS receiver on land communicates with a satellite to give the precise navigational coordinates of the receiver. Such technological convenience would hardly have been dreamt of during the dawning of the twenty-century, but today, in the twenty-first century it is seemingly common place. Not only has GPS been used to map out a route for someone, but it has also been used to track the location, direction, and speed of any given person or object.

Thus the lieutenant was able to have a GPS tracking device attached to the vehicle of this sergeant who was suspected of neglecting his responsibilities – and lying about it. The GPS tracking device revealed that the sergeant’s vehicle did not move once in 13 days’ time – even though the sergeant was on duty 4 of those days. The sergeant, not surprisingly, was fired. Though this may not be an option for everyone, a GPS tracking device can help an employer monitor an off-site employees activities, providing him or her additional evidence, if needed – for or against the employee. GPS tracking can provide an excellent means of employee accountability.