Marketing Meetings are Not Deducted from Hours Billed to a Government Client
My question involves labor and employment law for the state of: New Jersey
I am a salaried (exempt) employee for a company that almost exclusively works on Department of Defense government contracts.
Each day are required to record our hours worked on these various government contracts. (Typically down to 15 minute intervals.) We are required to use the charge number for the government contract we are working on.
We have been told to “Charge what you are working on”.
Once a week, the employees (like me) gather for an internal marketing meeting to see what new business opportunities are available. These meeting are called for and headed by management.
We discuss proposals, marketing trips, and ways to land new contracts. We meet for about an hour (10-11) and there are 15 of us who meet. (2 are management and 13 are workers like me)
I have asked management (numerous times) for a charge number for these meetings. Their response has always been “There is no charge number”.
All of the employees have been charging 8 hours on their time card for the days when we have these marking meetings. These 8 hours are divided among various government contracts but the 1 hour spent for the marketing meeting is not recorded anywhere on the timecard.
I always work after hours during the week to ensure that the hours charged to the government contracts that week are accurate and true.
Management reviews and approves our timecards every week. So management is keenly aware that these marketing meeting are not being recorded on our timecards.
A few questions:
Is not recording a marketing meeting, on a timecard, illegal?
Isn’t this marketing meeting an overhead expense and should be recorded as such?
What specific law/regulation is being violated?
What should I do?
Re: Marketing Meetings are Not Recorded on the Timecard of a Salaried Employee
If you are truly an exempt employee then your employer does not have to pay you overtime and indeed doesn’t need to keep track of the details of your time at all, at least with respect to the federal and state laws that relate to employee pay. The employer does need to know how many employees work at least 30 hours each week to determine whether it is subject to the requirement to provide health benefits under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) but the details of how the various hours the employee works is allocated doesn’t matter. Certainly the employer will want to ensure that it does not overbill the government for the work done, but nothing you’ve said suggests that this is what is occurring.
As for accounting, what the employer must account for is what the employer actually spends on employee compensation. Presumably the employer is doing that.
Thus, I’m not seeing what your concern is regarding this. It you are exempt and being paid on a salary basis, it wouldn’t affect your pay. It doesn’t appear that the government is being overbilled for anything. So what is the problem that you think the failure to assign a time charge code for the meeting is creating?
Re: Marketing Meetings are Not Recorded on the Timecard of a Salaried Employee
Quote:
Quoting
annjohnson
A few questions:
Is not recording a marketing meeting, on a timecard, illegal?
Isn’t this marketing meeting an overhead expense and should be recorded as such?
What specific law/regulation is being violated?
What should I do?
I am having trouble seeing anything illegal, or even unusual here. We don't, and perhaps you don't either, know what your employer is doing with this information. If this is strictly for internal bookkeeping, and they are using the hours you charge to each contract to track costs of the contract and use this information when bidding for another contract, then I see no reason you need to charge your meeting time to anything. If you believe the issue is that these hours are being directly billed to the customer, and your co-workers are including this meeting time under the contracts, so the customers are being over charged, then there may be a civil issue, but with out knowing exactly how the customer is being billed, or what the contract with the customer says, this is 100% speculation.
It sounds to me like these meetings are overhead time, If you simply don't charge this time to anything, are you questioned by management? If not, what is the issue? Maybe management just doesn't care to track how much man power is spent on these meetings.
Re: Marketing Meetings are Not Recorded on the Timecard of a Salaried Employee
I guess you are asking along lines of if there are 8 billable hours in a day and you work on specific contracts just 7 hours..where does the remaining 1 hour go ? Personally I'd not chose to make waves..if my boss expected 8 hours to be charged against some contract..Id make the numbers add up absent clear direction otherwise .
Re: Marketing Meetings are Not Recorded on the Timecard of a Salaried Employee
Management does not want us to put anything more than 40/week on our timecard.
Most other employees charge the government contracts for that 1 hour marketing meeting. So the government contracts are being charged for the marketing meeting.
From the DEFENSE CONTRACT AUDIT AGENCY / INFORMATION FOR CONTRACTORS
"(5) Recording all hours worked whether they are paid or not. This is necessary because
labor costs and associated overheads are affected by total hours worked, not just paid hours
worked. Therefore, labor rate computations and labor overhead costs should reflect all hours
worked. Unpaid hours worked are termed "uncompensated overtime."
http://www.dcaa.mil/DCAAM_7641.90.pdf page 16
Management knows that government contracts are paying for our marketing meeting.
Re: Marketing Meetings are Not Recorded on the Timecard of a Salaried Employee
Is your company large enough to have an ethics hotline where you can ask for guidance? Mine will take reports anonymously and provide answers to questions such as this.
Otherwise the Office of the Inspector General for the federal agency that issued the contract investigates time card fraud. They have toll-free numbers and email addresses where you can send a report. You can do a Google search to find the contact info for the IG's office for the agency you need. Reports can be made anonymously.