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Government Investigations in Singapore 2025
We have contributed the Singapore chapter of Getting the Deal Through, Government Investigations 2025.
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Canada | Publication | March 2, 2023
As a result of the pandemic, many employees moved to hybrid or completely remote working arrangements. Employers are now faced with the challenge of monitoring a workforce without direct supervision. Two recent cases show how an employer can leverage technology to monitor employee productivity and how to respond to suspected time theft. Time theft occurs when employees are paid for time they did not work and is a serious form of misconduct.
During the pandemic, an Ontario employer assigned two-person work crews to individual work vehicles to limit contact between employees.1 The employer expected each employee would drive independently to the assigned work site and complete the work together.
The employer received a complaint that an employee was not showing up to his scheduled assignments. It investigated and concluded the employee was paid for more than 200 hours when he did not attend his assigned work site. The employer terminated him for cause and successfully defended a grievance filed by the employee’s union. The arbitrator found just cause for dismissal based on reliable evidence of time theft collected by the employer:
In response to concerns about the productivity of an employee who worked from home, an employer in British Columbia scheduled weekly check-in meetings and installed time-tracking software on her laptop.2 The employer later noticed the employee submitted time for files she had not worked on. The employer used the time-tracking data to check for discrepancies between reported work time and work product. After discovering there were 50 hours on the employee’s timesheets that she did not spend on work-related tasks, the employer terminated the employee for just cause, and she initiated a wrongful dismissal action.
The employer successfully defended the wrongful dismissal action. The adjudicator found just cause for dismissal due to the evidence of time theft collected through computer monitoring software:
Time theft is a real risk of remote work. A combination of monitoring technologies and workplace management practices can reduce that risk. Best practices include:
Publication
We have contributed the Singapore chapter of Getting the Deal Through, Government Investigations 2025.
Publication
The private credit market and direct lending have grown and diversified immensely in the past decade, offering alternative sources and terms of debt compared to those historically provided by the syndicated leveraged loan and public issuance markets. Consequently, they are fast becoming pivotal components in the capital ecosystem, so much so that the Bank of England consider that the private credit market is currently responsible for approximately $1.8 trillion of debt issuance, which is four times its size in 2015. This growth has been particularly pronounced in Europe and the US but there has also been significant activity in Asia.
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The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Regulation, commonly referred to as the AI Act, is expected to come into force during the summer of 2024 (the AI Act). The AI Act will be the first comprehensive legal framework for the use and development of artificial intelligence (AI), and is intended to ensure that AI systems developed and used in the EU are safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory and environmentally friendly.
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