This pilot fish working for a large aerospace and defense contractor finds the time reporting onerous, and the reason is not a badge of honor for the company. It had gotten into a bit of trouble for telling employees to add cost overruns from fixed-price contracts to cost-plus contracts.

Since the government doesn’t like being bilked, the company had to refund a lot of money and implement new time-tracking and -reporting procedures.

Codes had to be looked up, and fish can easily spend more than a quarter of an hour per day just entering his time. Since the reporting is done in increments of 15 minutes, he asks what the charge code is for entering time. Too soon. No one appreciated the humor.

Some time after that, there is an edict: Don’t report unpaid overtime. Employees have learned that all their time has to be accounted for, so they’re entering extra hours that they worked but didn’t get paid for. That made HR and legal nervous, and thus the crackdown.

Unwanted side effect: Everyone wanted staff to do their work during that unpaid overtime, so it wouldn’t be charged to their contract.

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