Time Clock Rounding Analyses

Overview

Some wage and hour lawsuits allege that the employer’s time keeping policies systematically understate employees’ work time. A number of these lawsuits involve employers that pay their employees based on time clock punches that are rounded to the minute, five minutes, fifteen minute, or other time increment.

Plaintiffs in time clock rounding lawsuits typically allege that rounding systematically favors the employer and understates the employees’ work time. We analyze the economic impact of time clock rounding rules.

Time Impact

Some time clock rounding policies may be neutral in principle but non-neutral in practice. For any number of practical reasons, the employee or the employer may benefit more often than not from a seemingly neutral rounding policy.

An employee may find that punching out early or punching in late results in time being added. Similarly, employees that punch in early or punch out late may find time being subtracted.

The issue in wage and hour litigation involving time clock rounding is often to determine who benefits more often than not. In these types of wage and hour cases, it is also usually important to determine if the rounding’s impact was de minimis and there was the commonality and typicality among the plaintiff class.

Pay Impact

Determining the impact of the employer’s time clock rounding policies on pay is a key question that arises in time clock rounding litigation. In principle, a neutral time clock rounding policy would yield an essentially zero wage impact over a long period of time.

In practice, either the employee or the employer may benefit more often than not even from a seemingly neutral rounding policy. The analysis of the alleged pay impact in these types of wage and hour cases involves accurately matching the employee time clock punch data to the payroll records.

The analysis typically involves handling, matching and analyzing big data from inherently incompatible time and payroll data systems.

Penalty Calculations

In some states, such as California and Washington, there are monetary penalties for noncompliance with their labor codes.

The labor code may provide a penalty for each occurrence of the violation as well as penalties for the failure to maintain sufficient records. The penalty calculations may also require interest calculations to be performed.

We work with attorneys to calculate the appropriate penalties and interest in the lawsuit or investigation. Our staff is proficient at providing calculations and tabulations that are insightful and well documented.