This isn’t paranoia. It’s a real concern that costs businesses millions every year through time theft, identity fraud, and schemes where someone else performs the job entirely.

The Cost of Not Knowing Who’s Working

Time theft hits businesses harder than most realize. The American Payroll Association found that employers lose around 4.5 hours per week per employee to various forms of time theft. For someone earning $15 an hour, that’s roughly $3,500 gone every year. Multiply that across a company of 50 people and you’re potentially losing over $175,000 annually.

Then there’s buddy punching. About 75% of U.S. businesses deal with it. That’s when one employee clocks in or out for another. Nearly one in five employees admit they’ve done it for a coworker. Seems harmless enough, right? Except it accounts for about 2.2% of gross payroll losses across affected companies.

But these are the old problems. Remote work introduced new ones that are far worse.

The Proxy Worker Problem

Here’s a scenario that’s becoming disturbingly common: a skilled interviewer lands the job, but someone completely different shows up to do the actual work.

In documented cases, companies realized the person who aced their technical interviews wasn’t the same person accessing their systems every day. The interview candidate was essentially a hired gun – someone who interviews well and then hands off the position to whoever is actually going to do the work.

Sometimes it’s not even that organized. An employee accepts a full-time remote position, then quietly subcontracts the work to someone overseas while collecting the full salary. The employer has no clue who’s actually handling their sensitive data and accessing their systems.

The U.S. Department of Justice investigated operations where thousands of IT workers used stolen identities to infiltrate hundreds of American companies. These weren’t isolated incidents. It was systematic fraud at scale.

The Overemployment Scheme

Some people have figured out they can hold multiple full-time remote jobs at once. They use avatar software during meetings, keep their cameras off whenever possible, and juggle responsibilities across different employers.

On paper, they’re a dedicated full-time employee. In reality, you’re getting maybe 10-15 hours of actual attention per week while paying for 40. Quality suffers. Deadlines slip. And you have no idea why because your “full-time” employee seems to be online and responsive.

There are entire communities online dedicated to teaching people how to pull this off. They share tips on managing overlapping meetings, which jobs are easiest to juggle, and how to avoid detection.

Deepfake Interviews

This one sounds like science fiction, but it’s happening now. People use AI tools to alter their face and voice in real-time during video calls. An unqualified candidate can present themselves as someone completely different – sometimes even impersonating a real person whose credentials they’ve stolen.

The technology is good enough that hiring managers don’t notice anything wrong. The candidate passes multiple interview rounds, gets hired, and then either can’t do the job or was never planning to do it themselves in the first place.

The “Clock In and Disappear” Problem

Even without elaborate fraud schemes, remote work makes simple time theft trivially easy. Someone clocks in at 9am, does an hour of work, runs errands until 4pm, puts in another hour, and clocks out at 5. Their timesheet shows 8 hours. They worked 2.

With no one watching, there’s no accountability. Traditional time tracking systems only know when someone clicked a button. They have no idea if anyone was actually there.

Why Traditional Verification Doesn’t Work Anymore

In an office, these problems mostly solve themselves. You can see who’s at their desk. You recognize faces. You notice when someone’s not around.

Remote work removed all of that. The verification methods that replaced it are weak:

Passwords and logins can be shared with anyone. If your employee gives their credentials to a friend or contractor, you’d never know.

Periodic check-ins are easy to game. Show up for the standup meeting, disappear for the rest of the day.

Activity monitoring tells you a keyboard is being used, not who’s using it.

Video calls can be faked, avoided, or attended by the “real” employee while someone else does the actual work.

None of these methods answer the basic question: is the person I hired the person doing the work right now?

What Actually Solves This

Face recognition tied to time tracking closes these gaps. The concept is straightforward: verify that the person at the computer is the person you hired, not just at clock-in, but continuously throughout the workday.

This makes proxy workers impossible. It doesn’t matter if someone else has the login credentials – if their face doesn’t match the profile, the system knows.

Overemployment schemes fall apart when you can’t just “be online” without actually being present at your computer.

The clock-in-and-disappear problem goes away when verification happens every few minutes, not just at the start and end of the day.

And buddy punching becomes a thing of the past. You can’t clock in for someone else when the only way to clock in is with your own face.

The Privacy Concern

The obvious objection is privacy. Facial recognition at work sounds invasive. And it can be, if implemented poorly.

The key differences that make it acceptable:

Local processing. Good systems do all the face verification on the employee’s own device. The biometric data never leaves their computer. There’s no central server collecting face images.

No photo storage. The system converts faces into encrypted mathematical representations. It’s not storing pictures of employees. It can’t be turned back into photos.

Verification only. The system answers one question: is this the right person? It’s not tracking expressions, emotions, or anything else. It’s not surveillance. It’s identity confirmation.

Employee control. People can see what data exists about them and delete it if they leave the company.

When done right, it’s less invasive than having a manager look over your shoulder in an office – which was considered completely normal for decades.

The Bottom Line

Remote work created a verification vacuum. Traditional methods don’t work when you never see someone in person. The result is a growing industry of fraud – from simple time theft to elaborate identity schemes.

Face recognition in time tracking fills that gap. It answers the question that every remote employer needs answered: is the person I’m paying actually the person doing the work?

The companies that figure this out will be able to hire remotely with confidence. The ones that don’t will keep paying for work that isn’t being done by the people they think they hired.

SCREENish offers time tracking with continuous face verification, built for remote teams who need to know their workers are who they say they are.

With our Change Hourly Rate Tool you will be able to adjust the hourly rate to any employee for any time period you want. No limitations.

All you have to do is pick one of your active employees, then you will be asked for Start and End dates for this promotion as well as for what project you wish to apply those changes to. If you wish to apply same price on several projects – there is no problem, just pick them in the multi-select.

Finally, you will be asked whether you wish to change the hourly rate of your employee for those projects only by clicking on Please adjust Project prices accordingly. This will save you time instead of manually going to the projects, searching for this guy and manually applying the right price.

Before applying the price change, you will have a popup with a summaries of the action that you are about to do. This is your last chance to catch any possible errors in the request. If you agree, process will continue, hourly rates will be applied and you will get an Email warning about altering sensitive information inside SCREENish along with the IP address this of the user (most likely your own IP address). This way you will be always protected in case any of your employees tries to “adjust” his payments.

We know this and we already have a solution for you! No more manual fixing of time and prices! So .. how this helpful method works?

Imagine you have an employee on a fixed monthly salary – let’s say $2000. To be able to earn this money your employee will have to cover at least minimum of 40 hrs weekly, 4 weeks per month. How did you cover this so far?

Most likely you did setup a weekly limit, something like 40 hrs and perhaps a price of approximately $ 12.50 per hour (this will give you roughly $2000 per month). This method could work, but it has two serious problems:

1. Sometimes employees go out, forgetting to switch off their timers, so they end up finishing their limit long before Friday has come!

2. The month does not really contain exactly 4 weeks and if you use payroll reports you will have to manually correct the number of hours so the accounting could agree with the xls table you provide to them.

Not anymore! We present to you the SCREENish salary option for your employees! Probably you are curious to know how it works – it is really easy!

1. You will have to create a Monthly automated report type “Payrolls” from our accounting page. It may sound complicated, but everything you need to do is to select employees you wish to have into this report and the projects you wish to have it for. Then you click “Subscribe Monthly Report” and everything is done. You will get every month this report, containing all options you predefined few moments ago.

2. After you have done Step 1, you can go to Users page and to setup a Salary option for the employee you wish to have it applied for.

THAT IS ALL!

SCREENish will start monitoring these employees and when generate the Monthly Subscription report it will never return for this employee higher payroll than the monthly salary you predefined for him, even if he has worked more than 4×40 hrs this month. However, if your man did work less than this amount – it will write down the exact amount fair to be paid to him.

So what you say? Nice!

You can read about technical part of the process from HERE.