When he accepted a cell phone from his employer in 2005, John Halpin never guessed that a perk would get him fired.
John Haplin worked for the NYC school system as a carpenter supervisor for 21 years. According to city officials, he was falsifying his time-records.
How did they know? They’d been tracking his whereabouts for five months, via the GPS tracking system in his government-issued cell phone.
Officials activated the phone’s GPS tracking features after they became suspicious about Halpin’s time sheets.
Over five months, administrators noticed multiple discrepancies between where Halpin should have been, and where the GPS data showed he actually was.
Halpin earns $300 for a full day’s work, but sometimes left more than three hours early. He was tracked leaving work early 83 times between March and Aug in 2006, according to the NY Post.
In response to the data, an administrative judge said the 21 year veteran Halpin should get the axe. He was fired for accepting pay for time worked when he allegedly was not at work.
Halpin tried to fight the termination, saying he was never informed the phone could be used to track his movements, and questioned the accuracy of the data.
Unfortunately for Halpin, this did not convince administrative Judge Tynia Richard, who found him guilty of submitting false time records. The judge issued a decision saying the Department of Education was under no obligation “to notify its employees of all the methods it may possibly use to uncover their misconduct.”
