A SOFTWARE developer has been busted for outsourcing his own job to a programmer in China, while he watched cat videos at work.

The man, an employee who worked for a client of Verizon Enterprise Solutions in the United States, which published a blog post about the incident, ABC News in the US reports.

"We've seen plenty of employee misconduct cases, but not typically like this," principal Andrew Valentine said.

Mr Valentine said the incident was discovered when he was contacted by another company in the US for assistance over "anomalous activity" it had noticed in records. Employees had been logging in remotely to the company's IT system, it said.

The company's security team eventually discovered that someone was logging in from Shenyang, China, using the American employee's credentials. But all the while that employee was staring at a computer screen in the Verizon office in America, ABC News reports.

A search of the employee's computer found hundreds of PDF invoices from a third party contractor in Shenyang.

Eventually, it was discovered the employee had outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm, paying about $US50,000 to the firm out of his own salary of several hundred thousand dollars.

Once on-site, Mr Valentine said it took about two days for investigators to collect relevant evidence and put all the pieces together.

In his blog, Mr Valentine describes the employee as being in his mid-40s with a "relatively long tenure with the company, family man, inoffensive and quiet. Someone you wouldn't look at twice in an elevator", ABC News reports.

In the blog, Mr Valentine wrote that according to the man's web browsing history, "a typical 'work day'" went something like this:

- 9.00am: Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos

- 11.30am: Take lunch

- 1.00pm - EBay time

- 2.00-ishpm - Facebook updates - LinkedIn

- 4.30pm - End of day update e-mail to management

- 5.00pm - Go home

The employee had allegedly FedExed his company log-in key to China for the third-party contractor to use to log in to Verizon during the day.

The "best part" of the story is that "for the last several years in a row he received excellent remarks" in his performance review, Mr Valentine wrote in his blog.

"His code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building."

Mr Valentine said the employee has since been terminated for violating internal company policy.

"The employee denied everything at first, but then changed his story once we produced the invoices that were recovered from deleted disk space," Mr Valentine told ABC News.

"Honestly? I thought it was pretty clever. I think he took a calculated risk by knowingly violating company policy, for sure - but it was clever."

Mr Valentine said if the man had been even cleverer, he would have set up a server at home, or somewhere else off-site, for the Chinese consulting firm to access. Then he could proxy their traffic, making it appear that the traffic was coming from his home.

"That would have been a smarter way to go about it. But yes, either way, pretty clever," Mr Valentine said.

Verizon Enterprise Solutions is not releasing the name of the company or the employee.