Former Employee Accuses Vertical Screen of Wage and Hour Violations

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A former Vertical Screen, Inc. employee alleges he was deprived of overtime wages due to the company’s faulty time-keeping system and fraudulent practice of shaving down logged work hours.

According to the case, the plaintiff put in over 40 hours each week running pre-employment background checks with other researchers and team leaders in the company’s public records department. The man claims he was not paid for all time worked due in part to daily delays he experienced when trying to log into the defendant’s time-keeping system, Automatic Data Processing (ADP). From the complaint:

“[The plaintiff] experienced delays and problems logging-in to Defendant's timekeeping system almost every day, including: having to wait for other employees to log-out of the ADP system before he could log-in, having to wait for the computer to load, having to wait for the ADP system to load, having to update or reconfigure his password, experiencing a failed log-in and having to re-start the log-in process, being unable to log-in, having to send his supervisor an email describing his log-in problems.”

The plaintiff says that when all else failed, he resorted to letting his supervisor know that he was at work via e-mail. In these instances, the case continues, the timestamp of the message was recorded as the man’s clock in time even though he had been at work before then. The suit charges this system resulted in 10 to 15 minutes of unpaid wages each workday. 

Further, the complaint goes on to accuse the defendant of allowing managers and supervisors to reduce employees’ logged work time by one to two hours each month. If an employee noticed their shorted hours, the case alleges, the defendant would blame a “glitch” in the system and promise to look into the problem without taking any corrective action.