Why does NYC need a custom payroll system? Government agencies are supposed to be staffed by employees who can be trusted by the public not to abuse sensitive personal information such as is contained in tax returns. Yet, these same employees are considered so personally untrustworthy by the government that it is justified in spending hundreds of millions of dollars to design a payroll system whose primary feature seems to be innovative techniques for preventing fraud. Is there any evidence that government employees are more untrustworthy than other employees so as to justify such a system?
I'm not sure biometrics is really worth it either, but let's not be naïve here, we don't live in a trustworthy society by and large. If you're hiring people on the scale of a city, you're going to get untrustworthy people. There's no use in them putting their head in the sand and then avoiding doing anything that might suggest that maybe they have a few bad apples.
Also, it's not as if anywhere near the majority of those people have access to any given personal information. How many people does the city employee... 100,000? Every single one of those people will use the payroll system. By comparison, how many people have access to your birth certificate directly... 50? 100?
Yeah. This seems strange to me as well. If you need biometrics to prevent people from reporting hours when they aren't even in the building, why would you even want them to show up in the first place. If you get them to show up in order to collect a paycheck that doesn't mean they are going to do useful work. I'm guessing the problem is that you can't fire public employees.
This is because you can't always trust management to report things properly. My girlfriend works at a liquor store (small business, <50 employees) and they use a biometrics scanner for their clock in/clock out. It is very efficient and prevents the problems I stated. If sizable groups of your organization are cheating the system and your organization is large enough, it's going to be difficult to figure this out.
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Why does NYC need a custom payroll system? Government agencies are supposed to be staffed by employees who can be trusted by the public not to abuse sensitive personal information such as is contained in tax returns. Yet, these same employees are considered so personally untrustworthy by the government that it is justified in spending hundreds of millions of dollars to design a payroll system whose primary feature seems to be innovative techniques for preventing fraud. Is there any evidence that government employees are more untrustworthy than other employees so as to justify such a system?
I'm not sure biometrics is really worth it either, but let's not be naïve here, we don't live in a trustworthy society by and large. If you're hiring people on the scale of a city, you're going to get untrustworthy people. There's no use in them putting their head in the sand and then avoiding doing anything that might suggest that maybe they have a few bad apples.
Also, it's not as if anywhere near the majority of those people have access to any given personal information. How many people does the city employee... 100,000? Every single one of those people will use the payroll system. By comparison, how many people have access to your birth certificate directly... 50? 100?
Yeah. This seems strange to me as well. If you need biometrics to prevent people from reporting hours when they aren't even in the building, why would you even want them to show up in the first place. If you get them to show up in order to collect a paycheck that doesn't mean they are going to do useful work. I'm guessing the problem is that you can't fire public employees.
This is because you can't always trust management to report things properly. My girlfriend works at a liquor store (small business, <50 employees) and they use a biometrics scanner for their clock in/clock out. It is very efficient and prevents the problems I stated. If sizable groups of your organization are cheating the system and your organization is large enough, it's going to be difficult to figure this out.