July 30, 2017

Ethan Botha
9245 Regents Road
La Jolla, CA 92037

Dear Ethan,

This letter is to inform you that you are being terminated from our company effective immediately for time card manipulation.

Payroll manager Wei Lui instructed payroll technician Lucas Santos to conduct an audit of employees’ time cards from January 13–July 20, 2017. During the course of the audit, Lucas found numerous instances of your manually altering your employees’ time cards. You altered time cards of 22 employees on multiple occasions, and an aggregate total of 78 altered punches was identified. Your employees were subsequently underpaid a total of $1,183.36 since the beginning of the year.

When I asked you about this, you confirmed that you altered the time cards in order to minimize overtime payouts. You stated that as a manager, you felt under pressure to attain margin dollars and meet payroll goals. However, meeting budget or capping expenses is never an acceptable reason for engaging in dishonest practices such as this. Further, you stated that you never engaged in similar practices before this year and that this year was the first and only time you’ve made such manual edits to time cards to reduce hours worked and/or overtime hours.

The employees in question will be immediately repaid for these lost hours. Further spot audits will be conducted for prior years to ensure that your team members were not shorted payroll or overtime dollars. Because your actions constitute such a significant breach of company policy and practices in addition to dishonesty and record falsification, your employment with our organization is hereby terminated today. You will receive your final check separately according to payroll guidelines in addition to information regarding benefits continuation.

Sincerely,

Kai Yazzi
Director, Administration