26 ms·

Italian ‘king of absentees’ allegedly skipped work for 15 years

118 points by mathieuh 5y ago

CountDrewku 5y ago
If he was able to do this for 15 years and no one noticed I'm gonna have to put the blame on the employer. His job must not be necessary.
spzb 5y ago
My thoughts on this are similar to Dilbert’s https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-05-05 https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-05-05
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Wally, Peter, George, the three teachers
KaiserPro 5y ago
excellent work, but what was he doing in those intevening 15 years? wasn't he worried he'd be found out? how did he manage to make so many people lie for him to keep him employed? so many questions, from, erm, an academic stand point...
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  This kind of thing is rampant in Italy's public sector. They basically just found one of the worst offenders (i.e. the guy that half the public sector employees aim to be) and are making an example out of him. If this wasn't broadly considered ok he wouldn't have gotten away with it for 15yr and they wouldn't be going back 15yr to find "alleged threats" he made. Based on my experience the threat was something along the lines of "you know if you take a hard stance on this misconduct your career progression is dead" which is something that not everyone has to be explicitly told but a situation that damn near every career public servant (not just in italy) will have to deal with at some point.
- hans-moleman 5y ago
  The mafia was vouching for him for 15 years. Now he pissed someone off so they don’t protect his job anymore.
gnrlst 5y ago
The old fashioned "rest and vest"
Nextgrid 5y ago
If the "machine" somehow continued to work fine with him not being there for 15 years, why did his position even exist? The investigation and article focuses too much on "attendance" instead of measuring real work and raising the question as to which other positions are actually useless?
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >If the "machine" somehow continued to work fine with him not being there for 15 years, why did his position even exist? Tons of paper pushing positions exist so that politicians and high level appointed bureaucrats can do favors for people whom they owe favors. Someone (like the deadbeat brother of someone who donated to the governor's campaign or whatever, just making up a reasonable example) who could never hold such a well paying job on their own merits will be given a job and as long as they continue to punch the clock (though per TFA that's not a hard requirement in Italy) the will continue to get paid.
  - slumdev 5y ago
    These positions are sometimes called "patronage" jobs. The Vice President launched her career with a position like this, which she received from her married boyfriend, Willie Brown. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-launched-political-career-with-120k-patronage-job-from-boyfriend-willie-brown https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-la... > Granlund said the appointment seemed brazen at the time because of the relationship between Harris and Brown. “Screwing the speaker has its rewards,” he said. “Stevie Wonder could have seen through that play.”
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      I think there's a big difference between sucking your way to the front of the line of qualified applicants for a legitimate job vs jobs that exist simply to be given out for patronage purposes. IMO getting a job by pulling strings isn't as morally dirty as a job existing for no reason other than to transfer money from the taxpayer to someone with connections.
uglygoblin 5y ago
Maybe he was very productive in other endeavors, personally or societally and it was a net gain :) or maybe hundreds of patients over 15 years had undesirable results at the hospital that would of been better had his salary gone to somebody who showed up? UBI sounds pretty good in these situations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
gitanovic 5y ago
Italian public sector is long due for a clean-up, this is just the very visible tip of the iceberg. Cases of absenteeism have been reported by media almost on a daily basis for many many years, the problem is that nothing is really happening to those people. FWIW I am an Italian living abroad since 14 years
- ObserverNeutral 5y ago
  Not now! When the US is doing very low productivity infrastructure spending aimed essentially at putting money in people pockets as some sort of UBI which is not a UBI in the eyes of those who receive it. Just to propel economic growth Italy has that organically!
  - gitanovic 5y ago
    Nope UBI is a better thing, when you have extreme inefficient bureaucracy, and need to deal with it on a daily basis, this is not a good thing, it is actually slowing down the good parts that are left in the economical system You want to get rid of unproductive people hindering the productive ones, and UBI is a much better solution. So it's not organic, unless you mean like cancer is organic, in that sense I might agree. UBI in contrast, can be seen as something more benign
    - ObserverNeutral 5y ago
      UBI deflates the morale of those who receive it. Costly infrastructure building is actually neutral or maybe even net positive because people have the impression that they are screwing the government over, which is always good for self esteem. I bet this guy who skipped work for 15 years was super confident and extremely prone to spending the money he pocketed (but did not earn)
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    A UBI restricted to those that can land government gigs is not very universal.
izietto 5y ago
It is probably no coincidence that this happened in an Italian region where organized criminality was born (Calabria, the other ones are Sicilia and Campania.). This phenomenon happens there because organized criminality put their hands on government contracts and bribes the government inspectors. In this way organized criminality deals two important damages: it steals government money and it dramatically decreases life quality of the people living in those regions. For example, people from Calabria use to move to other regions when they need health treatments. Disclosure: I'm Italian.
- anovikov 5y ago
  Why no radical approach has been taken to fix it?
  - majewsky 5y ago
    Whoever tries to undermine the actions of the mob is next in line for a tragic accident. In a way, it's a coordination problem. If everyone outside of the mob were to unite at once against them, the mob wouldn't stand a chance. But that's not how activism works.
    - btbuildem 5y ago
      > If everyone [outside of the mob] were to unite at once That's basically how the mafia works
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Because it's almost certainly not as simple and unambigious as he's claiming. Everyone in NYC thinks they know all the ways they can fix Buffalo
    - georgeecollins 5y ago
      >> Everyone in NYC thinks they know all the ways they can fix Buffalo This sentence intrigued me, but as a life long Californian I wasn't sure what you meant.
francisofascii 5y ago
Fool them once, shame on you. Fool them 15 years, shame on them.
- hackeraccount 5y ago
  "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, 'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.'" I don't care what they say - greatest president ever.
ARandomerDude 5y ago
> Now aged 67, he faces charges of abuse of office, forgery and aggravated extortion. It doesn't sound like it's worked out well for him in the end. In fact, given the forgery and extortion charges, it actually sounds like he worked pretty hard at being so lazy.
- js2 5y ago
  I recently read/listened about a couple cons. A planet money episode about two brothers selling sham auto warranties. And a lady in California who pretended to be a personal assistant and then starting stealing her client's money. What always gets me about these con artists is both how talented they are and how much work they do. It never seems like they lack the skills or work ethic to make a legitimate living.
  - toomanybeersies 5y ago
    Way back when, I used to know a guy who was pretty keen on earning money in illegal ways. He was variously into car theft, drug trafficking, fraud, and whatever other trouble he could find for himself. He was an incredibly clever bloke, sharp as a tack. Despite getting into multiple police pursuits, plus various other stupid situations that would've ended with a 10+ year sentence, he didn't end up in jail. If he wanted to, he would've been able to find legitimate work with great pay. But because of some weird self-loathing complex that he had, he just wasn't keen on it.
- luckylion 5y ago
  > It doesn't sound like it's worked out well for him in the end. Half a million for threatening someone and forging some signature? And now the money's gone, presumably the wife and kids miraculously got more wealthy, and what will they do to a 67 year old? Two years of probation? The risk of him doing that again are pretty slim. Sounds like it worked out and paid extremely well.
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
  IDK, he made it 15 years and there's little to no chance of them getting the money back from him. Seems like it worked out well.
egypturnash 5y ago
This man is a hero.
achow 5y ago
This is one notch above.. 2,094 ghost employees working in USC: report https://www.dawn.com/news/1615213 https://www.dawn.com/news/1615213
Tade0 5y ago
Impressive, but I've seen worse. My mother used to work as an artisan in a theatre and the two worst offenders of this sort were: -Sceneshifters, whose relations with their superior were a little bit too good so instead of doing their jobs they left the work to my mom's co-workers at the same time reporting hours for that. -Actors with a long-term employment contract. In theory they were required to participate in at least one play every two years, but in reality the theatre could not afford to lose them and their brand, so they went years without even stepping in the building. On a smaller scale every sufficiently large corporation will have at least one such a person per team.
matsemann 5y ago
This is a classic: https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ I had to send it to a friend last year. He started a new job, in the meantime the team he was assigned to was disbanded so no one really knew where to put him. Never got access card, computer etc. Had to call his manager every morning to be let in, so it's not like he tried to hide. Never got assigned any tasks. When covid hit he had home office but still no tasks other than checking in each morning on some standup and saying he worked on nothing. After about half a year a new project finally started and he got something to do. But then he was so tired of it all he quit and got a job where he actually does something meaningful with his days.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
At annual review time for my first management job, HR gave me a list of my team members and their current compensation. One of the entries was a name I had never seen before. I responded to HR and told them they had made a mistake about that person. They informed me that no, he was on my team and were incredulous that I wasn’t managing him. I showed them that I had never received his name in any e-mail or Slack history since I started at the company, and no team members had ever worked with him. I messaged him in Slack to ask who he was working with, but he never responded despite being online. HR was very secretive after that, but from what I can gather the employee was reorganized into my team but no one ever told me. He worked at a remote office, so he simply sat around waiting for someone to contact him with instructions for what to do next. I don’t know how long he managed to collect paychecks without doing anything at all, but he disappeared from Slack shortly after this incident. HR at that company had other issues. I’m glad I don’t work there any more.
- milliondollar 5y ago
  It's time for the "Ron Brown* Vacation" story from dotcom boom 1.0. I was a tech project lead at a semi-famous internet portal startup, so worked across departments picking up staff for my projects. The DB guy assigned was Ron Brown. Went to onboard him and he wasn't at his desk. I ask the guy next to him. "Oh, he's on vacation this week." I came by the next week. No Ron Brown. Where is he? I got a very specific story in response: "He was in a fire, he had his feet burned." Terrible! So I got someone else assigned as DB guy. Never saw Ron Brown again. About six months later, I was down by his desk. Asked whatever happened to him. "Oh, last week we discovered he just stopped showing up to work, so we just fired him yesterday!" This was in a company of <200 people, and certainly there were less than 10 DB experts, all onsite. So I'm sure these days it's totally possible. *Name changed to protect guilty.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    At my last job there were stories of an employee who worked for both that company and a tech company across the street: just using “meetings” and other excuses to split his time and collect two salaries. The story goes that he was only discovered because the HR people at the companies would occasionally go out to lunch together and, one day, his name came up.
whydoineedthis 5y ago
This is why I schedule regular one-on-ones with the people I manage, need to make sure I haven't forgotten anyone over the weekend.
TheButlerian 5y ago
What an awful existence
dennis_jeeves 5y ago
As with many things the underlying problem is the 'public' sector which presumably is funded (partly or other wise) by the government. A government generally has no consequences of incompetence.
jjjeii3 5y ago
No wonder the Europe is on decline and very soon it will be worse than Africa. Laziest employees I ever seen in my life are all from Europe.
Uwqye2134trf 5y ago
When I worked in Russia, that was a common way to pay corruption fees for running a business. The way to go was to "employ" some person who never showed up to work, and pay "salary". Companies I worked for were branches of American ones. They were receiving funds from US, paying salary to software developers, and did not sold anything on local market, no cash was used, hence the workaround with fake employee.
- lifty 5y ago
  This is a known practice in some Eastern European countries as well.
kingsuper20 5y ago
I've never run into the phantom employee but I did work with one guy who ended up being the last person at a remote site who then picked up a second remote fulltime job. I light a candle to his memory now and again.
Naga 5y ago
Semi-related to this is that payroll is a risky area for external auditors. Payments are generalyl made to people who the auditors will never meet (thousands of them for big companies, or more) so there's always a risk that those people don't exist and that someone has fraudulently created an employee (as in, someone who is responsible for hiring people creates John Doe, registers him as an employee, paycheques go to the person responsible). As an auditor, couple of techniques to deal with this risk, such as examining employee files, googling person's name, but my favourite, and probably the most effective, is asking non-management if they know who that person is. If Steve in Shipping doesn't know who John Doe is, when he is apparently also in Shipping, is a sign that something fishy is going on.
janandonly 5y ago
Waawie. There exists a whole world out there where this is not just hypothetically possible but actually happening. I was born in the wrong place...
RandallBrown 5y ago
I had a manager that was out for a week because his father was recovering from some major surgery. When the day came that he was planning on being back in the office he sent another message saying his dad had to go back to the hospital and he would be a few more days. He sent a couple more messages like this, still not coming in. After 2 or 3 weeks he just stopped saying anything at all. He totally ghosted us. It took a really long time for him to officially be fired and we eventually had to break into his desk to get stuff out of it. I also heard we were suing him because he still had his work laptop. Bizarrely enough he tried to connect with a couple of us on LinkedIn afterwards so we knew where he went to work next. A few months later at a tech meetup we met someone from the team we saw he went to work for. They had the same bizarre experience as us. Showed up like normal for awhile and then just stopped coming in. Even better was that another person in that group had said their company just hired him! He was a perfectly competent manager and seemed like a nice guy so I can only imagine what the real story was.
insickness 5y ago
After I (barely) graduated from college with an engineering degree, I got hired by an engineering firm. It soon became apparent to me that my supervisor had no intention to give me any work. They were a government consulting company and so they were getting paid for every hour I supposedly worked and they were fine just keeping me on the books. I would come into work at 10AM, do nothing for five hours and leave at 3PM. Went on for about two years. I was super into my extra curricular activities, so I didn't mind at the time. But for me it was very unhealthy mentally to not be productive like that. Even now I'm aware at my current job working from home, that when my work slows down, I don't feel as good about my life as when I am productive at work.
gonzus 5y ago
I have seen this happen, first hand, in the public sector. I used to work with two guys in a company that shall remain nameless. After a while, they started taking some of the team to lunch every Friday. Not a quick, frugal lunch, but lunch at some nice restaurant downtown, with lots of food and drinks, taking a couple of hours. And they would sign for those lunches all the time, as company-approved expenses. After a while, having become a bit closer with them, they confessed to how they did it: they had found a bug in the company's control system, where each of them could approve the other guy's expenses. So they would take turns signing off their lunches; after a while, they felt confident enough to invite other people to them. I stopped working with them soon after that, but I heard they kept up this act for quite a while.
BlasDeLezo 5y ago
The brits always coming up with these funny workplace examples always from the PIGS countries, and no way to comment them. Here's a pedophile english teacher detained just today in Madrid, Spain, he sexually abused 36 minors. https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2021-04-23/detenido-un-prof https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2021-04-23/detenido-un-prof...
- harperlee 5y ago
  You have a point about black legend remnants, and this happens everywhere as other comments attest to, BUT here is a spanish (Alicante) public servant that also reached 15 years without working, and this is not Mafia related: https://www.publico.es/sociedad/funcionario-estuvo-15-anos-vuelve-baja.html https://www.publico.es/sociedad/funcionario-estuvo-15-anos-v...

118 points by mathieuh 5y ago

If he was able to do this for 15 years and no one noticed I'm gonna have to put the blame on the employer. His job must not be necessary.

spzb 5y ago

My thoughts on this are similar to Dilbert’s https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-05-05 https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-05-05

forgotmypw17 5y ago
Wally, Peter, George, the three teachers

KaiserPro 5y ago

excellent work, but what was he doing in those intevening 15 years? wasn't he worried he'd be found out? how did he manage to make so many people lie for him to keep him employed? so many questions, from, erm, an academic stand point...

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
This kind of thing is rampant in Italy's public sector. They basically just found one of the worst offenders (i.e. the guy that half the public sector employees aim to be) and are making an example out of him. If this wasn't broadly considered ok he wouldn't have gotten away with it for 15yr and they wouldn't be going back 15yr to find "alleged threats" he made. Based on my experience the threat was something along the lines of "you know if you take a hard stance on this misconduct your career progression is dead" which is something that not everyone has to be explicitly told but a situation that damn near every career public servant (not just in italy) will have to deal with at some point.
hans-moleman 5y ago
The mafia was vouching for him for 15 years. Now he pissed someone off so they don’t protect his job anymore.

gnrlst 5y ago

The old fashioned "rest and vest"

Nextgrid 5y ago

If the "machine" somehow continued to work fine with him not being there for 15 years, why did his position even exist? The investigation and article focuses too much on "attendance" instead of measuring real work and raising the question as to which other positions are actually useless?

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>If the "machine" somehow continued to work fine with him not being there for 15 years, why did his position even exist? Tons of paper pushing positions exist so that politicians and high level appointed bureaucrats can do favors for people whom they owe favors. Someone (like the deadbeat brother of someone who donated to the governor's campaign or whatever, just making up a reasonable example) who could never hold such a well paying job on their own merits will be given a job and as long as they continue to punch the clock (though per TFA that's not a hard requirement in Italy) the will continue to get paid.
- slumdev 5y ago
  These positions are sometimes called "patronage" jobs. The Vice President launched her career with a position like this, which she received from her married boyfriend, Willie Brown. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-launched-political-career-with-120k-patronage-job-from-boyfriend-willie-brown https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-la... > Granlund said the appointment seemed brazen at the time because of the relationship between Harris and Brown. “Screwing the speaker has its rewards,” he said. “Stevie Wonder could have seen through that play.”
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    I think there's a big difference between sucking your way to the front of the line of qualified applicants for a legitimate job vs jobs that exist simply to be given out for patronage purposes. IMO getting a job by pulling strings isn't as morally dirty as a job existing for no reason other than to transfer money from the taxpayer to someone with connections.

uglygoblin 5y ago

Maybe he was very productive in other endeavors, personally or societally and it was a net gain :) or maybe hundreds of patients over 15 years had undesirable results at the hospital that would of been better had his salary gone to somebody who showed up? UBI sounds pretty good in these situations.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

gitanovic 5y ago

Italian public sector is long due for a clean-up, this is just the very visible tip of the iceberg. Cases of absenteeism have been reported by media almost on a daily basis for many many years, the problem is that nothing is really happening to those people. FWIW I am an Italian living abroad since 14 years

ObserverNeutral 5y ago
Not now! When the US is doing very low productivity infrastructure spending aimed essentially at putting money in people pockets as some sort of UBI which is not a UBI in the eyes of those who receive it. Just to propel economic growth Italy has that organically!
- gitanovic 5y ago
  Nope UBI is a better thing, when you have extreme inefficient bureaucracy, and need to deal with it on a daily basis, this is not a good thing, it is actually slowing down the good parts that are left in the economical system You want to get rid of unproductive people hindering the productive ones, and UBI is a much better solution. So it's not organic, unless you mean like cancer is organic, in that sense I might agree. UBI in contrast, can be seen as something more benign
  - ObserverNeutral 5y ago
    UBI deflates the morale of those who receive it. Costly infrastructure building is actually neutral or maybe even net positive because people have the impression that they are screwing the government over, which is always good for self esteem. I bet this guy who skipped work for 15 years was super confident and extremely prone to spending the money he pocketed (but did not earn)
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  A UBI restricted to those that can land government gigs is not very universal.

izietto 5y ago

It is probably no coincidence that this happened in an Italian region where organized criminality was born (Calabria, the other ones are Sicilia and Campania.). This phenomenon happens there because organized criminality put their hands on government contracts and bribes the government inspectors. In this way organized criminality deals two important damages: it steals government money and it dramatically decreases life quality of the people living in those regions. For example, people from Calabria use to move to other regions when they need health treatments. Disclosure: I'm Italian.

anovikov 5y ago
Why no radical approach has been taken to fix it?
- majewsky 5y ago
  Whoever tries to undermine the actions of the mob is next in line for a tragic accident. In a way, it's a coordination problem. If everyone outside of the mob were to unite at once against them, the mob wouldn't stand a chance. But that's not how activism works.
  - btbuildem 5y ago
    > If everyone [outside of the mob] were to unite at once That's basically how the mafia works
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Because it's almost certainly not as simple and unambigious as he's claiming. Everyone in NYC thinks they know all the ways they can fix Buffalo
  - georgeecollins 5y ago
    >> Everyone in NYC thinks they know all the ways they can fix Buffalo This sentence intrigued me, but as a life long Californian I wasn't sure what you meant.

francisofascii 5y ago

Fool them once, shame on you. Fool them 15 years, shame on them.

hackeraccount 5y ago
"There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, 'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.'" I don't care what they say - greatest president ever.

ARandomerDude 5y ago

> Now aged 67, he faces charges of abuse of office, forgery and aggravated extortion. It doesn't sound like it's worked out well for him in the end. In fact, given the forgery and extortion charges, it actually sounds like he worked pretty hard at being so lazy.

js2 5y ago
I recently read/listened about a couple cons. A planet money episode about two brothers selling sham auto warranties. And a lady in California who pretended to be a personal assistant and then starting stealing her client's money. What always gets me about these con artists is both how talented they are and how much work they do. It never seems like they lack the skills or work ethic to make a legitimate living.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  Way back when, I used to know a guy who was pretty keen on earning money in illegal ways. He was variously into car theft, drug trafficking, fraud, and whatever other trouble he could find for himself. He was an incredibly clever bloke, sharp as a tack. Despite getting into multiple police pursuits, plus various other stupid situations that would've ended with a 10+ year sentence, he didn't end up in jail. If he wanted to, he would've been able to find legitimate work with great pay. But because of some weird self-loathing complex that he had, he just wasn't keen on it.
luckylion 5y ago
> It doesn't sound like it's worked out well for him in the end. Half a million for threatening someone and forging some signature? And now the money's gone, presumably the wife and kids miraculously got more wealthy, and what will they do to a 67 year old? Two years of probation? The risk of him doing that again are pretty slim. Sounds like it worked out and paid extremely well.
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
IDK, he made it 15 years and there's little to no chance of them getting the money back from him. Seems like it worked out well.

egypturnash 5y ago

This man is a hero.

achow 5y ago

This is one notch above.. 2,094 ghost employees working in USC: report https://www.dawn.com/news/1615213 https://www.dawn.com/news/1615213

Tade0 5y ago

Impressive, but I've seen worse. My mother used to work as an artisan in a theatre and the two worst offenders of this sort were: -Sceneshifters, whose relations with their superior were a little bit too good so instead of doing their jobs they left the work to my mom's co-workers at the same time reporting hours for that. -Actors with a long-term employment contract. In theory they were required to participate in at least one play every two years, but in reality the theatre could not afford to lose them and their brand, so they went years without even stepping in the building. On a smaller scale every sufficiently large corporation will have at least one such a person per team.

matsemann 5y ago

This is a classic: https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ I had to send it to a friend last year. He started a new job, in the meantime the team he was assigned to was disbanded so no one really knew where to put him. Never got access card, computer etc. Had to call his manager every morning to be let in, so it's not like he tried to hide. Never got assigned any tasks. When covid hit he had home office but still no tasks other than checking in each morning on some standup and saying he worked on nothing. After about half a year a new project finally started and he got something to do. But then he was so tired of it all he quit and got a job where he actually does something meaningful with his days.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

At annual review time for my first management job, HR gave me a list of my team members and their current compensation. One of the entries was a name I had never seen before. I responded to HR and told them they had made a mistake about that person. They informed me that no, he was on my team and were incredulous that I wasn’t managing him. I showed them that I had never received his name in any e-mail or Slack history since I started at the company, and no team members had ever worked with him. I messaged him in Slack to ask who he was working with, but he never responded despite being online. HR was very secretive after that, but from what I can gather the employee was reorganized into my team but no one ever told me. He worked at a remote office, so he simply sat around waiting for someone to contact him with instructions for what to do next. I don’t know how long he managed to collect paychecks without doing anything at all, but he disappeared from Slack shortly after this incident. HR at that company had other issues. I’m glad I don’t work there any more.

milliondollar 5y ago
It's time for the "Ron Brown* Vacation" story from dotcom boom 1.0. I was a tech project lead at a semi-famous internet portal startup, so worked across departments picking up staff for my projects. The DB guy assigned was Ron Brown. Went to onboard him and he wasn't at his desk. I ask the guy next to him. "Oh, he's on vacation this week." I came by the next week. No Ron Brown. Where is he? I got a very specific story in response: "He was in a fire, he had his feet burned." Terrible! So I got someone else assigned as DB guy. Never saw Ron Brown again. About six months later, I was down by his desk. Asked whatever happened to him. "Oh, last week we discovered he just stopped showing up to work, so we just fired him yesterday!" This was in a company of <200 people, and certainly there were less than 10 DB experts, all onsite. So I'm sure these days it's totally possible. *Name changed to protect guilty.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  At my last job there were stories of an employee who worked for both that company and a tech company across the street: just using “meetings” and other excuses to split his time and collect two salaries. The story goes that he was only discovered because the HR people at the companies would occasionally go out to lunch together and, one day, his name came up.

whydoineedthis 5y ago

This is why I schedule regular one-on-ones with the people I manage, need to make sure I haven't forgotten anyone over the weekend.

TheButlerian 5y ago

What an awful existence

dennis_jeeves 5y ago

As with many things the underlying problem is the 'public' sector which presumably is funded (partly or other wise) by the government. A government generally has no consequences of incompetence.

jjjeii3 5y ago

No wonder the Europe is on decline and very soon it will be worse than Africa. Laziest employees I ever seen in my life are all from Europe.

Uwqye2134trf 5y ago

When I worked in Russia, that was a common way to pay corruption fees for running a business. The way to go was to "employ" some person who never showed up to work, and pay "salary". Companies I worked for were branches of American ones. They were receiving funds from US, paying salary to software developers, and did not sold anything on local market, no cash was used, hence the workaround with fake employee.

lifty 5y ago
This is a known practice in some Eastern European countries as well.

kingsuper20 5y ago

I've never run into the phantom employee but I did work with one guy who ended up being the last person at a remote site who then picked up a second remote fulltime job. I light a candle to his memory now and again.

Naga 5y ago

Semi-related to this is that payroll is a risky area for external auditors. Payments are generalyl made to people who the auditors will never meet (thousands of them for big companies, or more) so there's always a risk that those people don't exist and that someone has fraudulently created an employee (as in, someone who is responsible for hiring people creates John Doe, registers him as an employee, paycheques go to the person responsible). As an auditor, couple of techniques to deal with this risk, such as examining employee files, googling person's name, but my favourite, and probably the most effective, is asking non-management if they know who that person is. If Steve in Shipping doesn't know who John Doe is, when he is apparently also in Shipping, is a sign that something fishy is going on.

janandonly 5y ago

Waawie. There exists a whole world out there where this is not just hypothetically possible but actually happening. I was born in the wrong place...

RandallBrown 5y ago

I had a manager that was out for a week because his father was recovering from some major surgery. When the day came that he was planning on being back in the office he sent another message saying his dad had to go back to the hospital and he would be a few more days. He sent a couple more messages like this, still not coming in. After 2 or 3 weeks he just stopped saying anything at all. He totally ghosted us. It took a really long time for him to officially be fired and we eventually had to break into his desk to get stuff out of it. I also heard we were suing him because he still had his work laptop. Bizarrely enough he tried to connect with a couple of us on LinkedIn afterwards so we knew where he went to work next. A few months later at a tech meetup we met someone from the team we saw he went to work for. They had the same bizarre experience as us. Showed up like normal for awhile and then just stopped coming in. Even better was that another person in that group had said their company just hired him! He was a perfectly competent manager and seemed like a nice guy so I can only imagine what the real story was.

insickness 5y ago

After I (barely) graduated from college with an engineering degree, I got hired by an engineering firm. It soon became apparent to me that my supervisor had no intention to give me any work. They were a government consulting company and so they were getting paid for every hour I supposedly worked and they were fine just keeping me on the books. I would come into work at 10AM, do nothing for five hours and leave at 3PM. Went on for about two years. I was super into my extra curricular activities, so I didn't mind at the time. But for me it was very unhealthy mentally to not be productive like that. Even now I'm aware at my current job working from home, that when my work slows down, I don't feel as good about my life as when I am productive at work.

gonzus 5y ago

I have seen this happen, first hand, in the public sector. I used to work with two guys in a company that shall remain nameless. After a while, they started taking some of the team to lunch every Friday. Not a quick, frugal lunch, but lunch at some nice restaurant downtown, with lots of food and drinks, taking a couple of hours. And they would sign for those lunches all the time, as company-approved expenses. After a while, having become a bit closer with them, they confessed to how they did it: they had found a bug in the company's control system, where each of them could approve the other guy's expenses. So they would take turns signing off their lunches; after a while, they felt confident enough to invite other people to them. I stopped working with them soon after that, but I heard they kept up this act for quite a while.

BlasDeLezo 5y ago

The brits always coming up with these funny workplace examples always from the PIGS countries, and no way to comment them. Here's a pedophile english teacher detained just today in Madrid, Spain, he sexually abused 36 minors. https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2021-04-23/detenido-un-prof https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2021-04-23/detenido-un-prof...

harperlee 5y ago
You have a point about black legend remnants, and this happens everywhere as other comments attest to, BUT here is a spanish (Alicante) public servant that also reached 15 years without working, and this is not Mafia related: https://www.publico.es/sociedad/funcionario-estuvo-15-anos-vuelve-baja.html https://www.publico.es/sociedad/funcionario-estuvo-15-anos-v...