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Employee Accused of Skipping Work for 15 Years (bbc.com) 109

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
A hospital employee in Italy has been accused of skipping work on full pay for 15 years, local media report. From a report: The man is alleged to have stopped turning up to work at the Ciaccio hospital in the southern city of Catanzaro in 2005. He is now being investigated for fraud, extortion and abuse of office, Italian news agency Ansa reports. He was reportedly paid $649,500 in total over the years he is thought not to have been working. Six managers at the hospital are also being investigated in connection with the alleged absenteeism. The arrests are the result of a lengthy police investigation into absenteeism and suspected fraud in the Italian public sector.
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Employee Accused of Skipping Work for 15 Years More

Employee Accused of Skipping Work for 15 Years

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  • Impressive (Score:5, Funny)

    by cusco ( 717999 ) <brian.bixby@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:07PM (#61305202)

    Maybe I need to move to Italy before I retire.

    • Re:Impressive (Score:5, Funny)

      by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:08PM (#61305208)
      Or you could just become a /. editor, then you might not need to move for that. Unless of course you love Italy...

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by OrangeTide ( 124937 )

        I'm going to guess the food in Italy is better than the microwave ramen a /. editor survives on.

        One disadvantage about working from home is there isn't enough time to cook yourself a nice lunch. I've been cooking extra for dinner just to have an option of warming up some decent left overs rather than an expensive and gross microwave meal.

        • Re:Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:16PM (#61305248)

          One disadvantage about working from home is there isn't enough time to cook yourself a nice lunch.

          Where do you work that you have more time to cook lunch when you go in to the office?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ksheff ( 2406 )
            They are possibly running a lot more errands during their lunch break? Naps are also becoming more popular so I hear.

          • I can turn money into a decent meal at a restaurant or the campus cafeteria.

          • One disadvantage about working from home is there isn't enough time to cook yourself a nice lunch.

            Where do you work that you have more time to cook lunch when you go in to the office?

            Maybe OrangeTide works for a company that provides free meals (and snacks) [glassdoor.com] for their employees. Lots of companies outside of Silicon Valley offer in-house chefs or catered lunch and dinner.

            If you work from home, not only is it time consuming but also expensive to cook meals as nice as what you'd get at the office.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Bodie1 ( 1347679 )

              Yes, or anywhere where one can go to another building, or even room, and have a lunch that someone else cooked for them. Just a guess.

              • Because it's impossible to drive from your house to a restaurant. You start, and the car just explodes after the first 1/4 mile. It's extremely dangerous.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by JustOK ( 667959 )
          Italy has the best Mexican food I've ever had.
          • Best TexMex I ever had was in Amman, Jordan. The owner had gone to school at Arizona State and fell in love with TexMex cuisine and decided to bring it back home. The beer selection was wrong, but boy was the food good.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          We loved the food in Italy, except that they don't eat potatoes (gnocchi don't count). My wife is Peruvian, and after two weeks in Italy she was craving potatoes. The last time that I was in McDonalds was in Sienna, we went in, she had a double serving of fries, and then was OK for the last week.

        • One disadvantage about working from home is there isn't enough time to cook yourself a nice lunch. I've been cooking extra for dinner just to have an option of warming up some decent left overs rather than an expensive and gross microwave meal.

          I've been planning on leftovers from dinner most of my professional career. It's expensive to eat out every lunch. I don't call ramen gross (I grew up in Hawaii), but I can't eat it every day. Most frozen meals have insane sodium which does not combine well with the sedentary programming I do every day.

        • One disadvantage about working from home is there isn't enough time to cook yourself a nice lunch.

          As opposed to when you're working in an office?

        • One disadvantage about working from home is there isn't enough time to cook yourself a nice lunch.

          What do you do with the time saved from commuting?

        • I cook a lot more since I've been working from home.

        • Working at home where I have a full kitchen and all my ingredients vs the office where I eat my leftovers from dinner?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by RandySC ( 9804 )

        Ezekiel 23:20 is one of my favorite bible verses. How do they explain this to children?

    • Maybe I need to move to Italy before I retire.

      Why move there? You can not show up just as easily from anywhere else.

    • They have these in Northern New Jersey. They're part of the construction trade, integral to the Esplanade deal for example. They're called no-show jobs; seems to be an Italian thing. There was a whole show about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      In all seriousness though, this is big money in organized crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Or just work at the US Patent Office?

  • Why did I tell the bobs the truth? (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:16PM (#61305250)

    Why did I tell the bobs the truth?

    You think with 6 boss they would see me spacing out most of the day and why did I tell that I only do TPS reports 15 min an week as my only real work.

  • Where they paid him but he didn't have to show up. I wonder what negative incentive he used on those bosses?

  • HR needs to see you. (Score:5, Funny)

    by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:18PM (#61305262)

    "Giancarlo, you've been missing a lot of work over the past 15 years"

    "Oh I wouldn't say I missed it at all"

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ksheff ( 2406 )
      No shit.
      If management and HR didn't notice this guy wasn't working, that's their fault. Few would complain about the extra deposits in the bank account.

      • Re:HR needs to see you. (Score:4)

        by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @01:32PM (#61305638)
        I wouldn't say the didn't notice: "The police have also accused him of threatening his manager to stop her from filing a disciplinary report against him."

        But I guess they'll have to sort it out. Maybe she is claiming to have been threatened to cover for gross incompetence of her own, who knows.

      • Except that's not legal almost anywhere in the world.

        What the guy should have done was show up every day and just read a book or do busywork. Find a quiet corner and claim it, be polite but anti-social.

        It's absolutely fraud to take money for services not rendered. It's not fraud to take money for doing your job very badly. That's on your managers to deal with, and if they don't that's on their managers to deal with.

        • Does it matter if you're not rendering the services from home or not rendering the services in the office? It seems like you're trying to construct an argument around language in a way that doesn't make sense. Doing the job poorly would imply attempting to perform the duties but failing or even doing something which is ultimately counterproductive. It doesn't matter what kind of activities are performed instead of those he was supposed to be doing.

          • It many cases, there is a large difference.
            Being physically in the office, implies one has shown up to work, and being paid for time on-premesis.

            Past experience: if you didn't show up to work -- you were considered to have "quit", for abandonment of the job. However, showing up at 9; browsing the internet all day, taking off for an hour lunch off premise - that was acceptable, and justified full pay.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )

      Yeah, they're going to chew him out when he comes in tomor---err, the next time . . . :)

      haw

    • Offie Space notwithstanding this is why we have TPS reports. Hate me if you want to.

  • Real life Milton? /s (Score:3)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:21PM (#61305280)

    Cue obligatory Office Space jokes. [youtube.com]

  • Very common in Italy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dargaud ( 518470 ) <[ten.duagradg] [ta] [2todhsals]> on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:24PM (#61305300) Homepage
    I used to work in Italy and this kind of occurences was in the news every week. At my work (public research lab) there was a guy who showed up every morning, opened up his office, left his jacket on his chair and left to go work in the private sector; he would come back in the evening to get his jacket and leave. Everybody knew it but he couldn't be fired ("I was around").
    • What was the color of your jacket? *wink wink* ;-)
    • I used to work at a place where a coworker, whose cubicle was right across from mine, was never in her office. Never. Yet her office always looked like she was there but had just stepped out--her desk lights were on, her glasses were set right by the keyboard, her chair was turned just right, etc. I was convinced she hadn't been there for months and her friends were moving things around in her office so it would appear that she was there. I knew she had some emotional and social or domestic issues she

    • Not only in Italy.... check Italy's "cousin", Spain:

      https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]

      And there are many of these cases ( I have seen this with my own eyes and I even reported one but it lead nowhere and, truth be told, I didn't push it).

      PS: don't think this is intrinsic to "latin" countries. I live in Germany and I see "tricks" like this also happening there as well.

    • Also very common at the US Patent Office.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

        Also very common at the US Patent Office.

        If you have specifics you can let the Inspector General know. Write down specifics. Turn it over. You can even do it anonymously.
        I did that as a contractor and ended up bagging an entire section of freeloaders. At this agency it was really bad. Nepotism, taking days, even weeks off and they'd cover for each other. Then talk about it with impunity. Turned out everyone was in on it. They can never work for the Government again. If you do that, you can tell no one. I mean no one. You can't let it get back to t

        • I guess you missed the scandal: https://www.federaltimes.com/m... [federaltimes.com]

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

            You're right. I missed that. However I thought you were talking about something happening right now.
            That section I talked about above, they hired all new people. Now they're very careful what they do. There is no more signing in for someone else. There is no more BS. Everyone else took notice as well. The section fired was the HR section that does background checks, HR, things like that. So everyone knew about it because all new hires came to an abrupt halt. I think they brought people in from another agenc

  • A great hero (Score:3)

    by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:25PM (#61305308)
    What a hero. Too bad the villains caught before his work was done.

  • I doubt I could go more than a day without my supervisor and team noticing (once I got a call because I was.2 minutes late!!!). What was his job function that he could go 15 YEARS without anyone catching on?

    • Re:Job Function? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:36PM (#61305384)

      It's called a "no show" job and they are commonplace. Many non-profits in the US exist to provide no show positions for the relatives and friends of powerful people who have their wages laundered through the non-profit.

  • It looks like this employee was doing a lower wage job at a hospital figuring about 46k a year. So probably a job that they are many other people doing the same thing, so them not working wasn't noticed, and that name was just probably seemed like a data entry error on the System, where the manager of the Unit, figured Payroll will just figure it out, and Payroll had now way to figure it out.
    It seemed to me that that employee just cold quit the job, and paperwork wasn't properly filled out and that employe

  • Common in US (Score:5, Informative)

    by jodido ( 1052890 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:41PM (#61305410)
    This traditionally was pretty common in the US--the "no-show" government job. A favor from a politico, in return for electoral support or something else. The supervisors would know about it and so would everyone else, and it was understood that it was something you didn't talk about--if you wanted to keep your job. There was a guy in my office who showed up once every two weeks, for an hour, to collect his paycheck. Nowadays with direct deposit you don't even have to put in that much effort.

    • Re:Common in US (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:50PM (#61305444)

      yes common in the big cities, also getting pay for two jobs as "favor"

      this message brought to you from Chicago, where the dead vote early and often.

      • The official term for this is patronage position in Chicago. Why you have to pay off people in a political party to support you is a remarkable thought experiment on the chicago democratic party. Ill clue you in, most of the party structure is there because they bought into the party structure and do not recognize the world outside of it.

        There is a whole titled leadership chain, that never shows for daily service unless its election season or the cameras are on. The true department head is the hardes

  • Fraud? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Camel Pilot ( 78781 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:53PM (#61305472) Homepage Journal

    This fellow is just an earlier adopter of Universal Basic Income

  • And then a hero comes along (Score:3)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @01:01PM (#61305488) Journal

    I don't care what you say. A guy who can skip work for 15 years is a goddamn hero.

  • Back in Bangalore my colleague, lets call him Fernand, invented the two helmet technology

    He has one helmet that he keeps in the motorcycle. There is another one in his desk drawer. He will take the helmet in the desk drawer, leave it on the table, and just saunter off anytime he felt like. If his boss asks for him, his friends will say, "He must be around here, Sir, His helmet is here!" and point out the helmet.

    No cell phones those days. Fernand will be told the next day about the boss's query and he wil

  • What about the manager? (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @01:28PM (#61305610) Journal

    There had to be a manager somewhere, receiving his "work" and giving him annual "performance reviews" or for that matter, even checking whatever log, time clock, or you know... just wandering over to his cubicle to "see if he was there".

    What about that guy? Huh?

    Ahh.... that guy has probably not been working for 30 years; but has better connections maybe.

    I've never actually seen this kind of thing personally. The closest I came was a story related to me 2nd hand. There was a woman in his office working "full time", but she seemed a bit sparse at times. Turns out she was equally sparse at another office in the same building. Of course I'm telling you this story because she got busted and lost both jobs. The money must have been good while it lasted, but dang, talk about pressure. Every day must have been so tense for her. Either that, or some kind of unique personality that thrived on the thrill?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      No doubt the manager has been 'informed' that he is not to question the guys absence, or even whether or not the guy actually exists.

    • From the article; "The police have also accused him of threatening his manager to stop her from filing a disciplinary report against him."

  • If you want to get paid for not working... (Score:3)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @01:47PM (#61305708)
    ...you need to have lots of money.

    Anybody can see our economy is set up to reward owners, not workers. So I started dumping the max into my 401k when I started my career. Nothing special, just low-cost index funds. Now the valuation of my account has gone up by more than the pay for my job - which I work at for 40+ hours each week by the way - for each of the last 3 years. I can't get a raise or a bonus to save my life, but every time I check my account it's up or down by tens of thousands, all based on pretty much nothing, or certainly not anything that I did. I guess we'll see whether it evaporates before I get a chance to spend it.

    • Dude.

      Get out and spend some of those savings this year and look for a new job while the economy for IT workers is good. If your not getting raises your someone's no show worker who is to dumb not to show up.

      Most of us work dam hard and get the yearly your just IT brush off on raises all the time, but then one or two move on from the department, we walk into the bosses office and then ask for a raise, or do you want to be filling 3 - 4 slots in the specialized department of 5-7 people with 2 turds in the

  • Is this a record? I remember someone in Spain skipped worked for like 8 years. There was a US guy that outsourced his own work for a few years.

  • Even Wally (from the Dilbert comic strip) who does not do any real work shows up every day.
  • I have worked with several folks who quit working years ago, they just have not retired yet.

  • And I thoought (Score:3)

    by fredrated ( 639554 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @02:48PM (#61305954) Journal

    I was a slacker. This guy could give me lessons.

    • I was a slacker. This guy could give me lessons.

      That sounds like learning and work, turn in your slacker card -- but not to me, I'm unavailable.

  • Obviously no one is looking at team performance.

  • He is now being investigated for fraud, extortion and abuse of office, ...

    He stopped showing up, but they kept *giving* him money. How's that his problem? The managers' sure, but not his. TFA doesn't say if he kept submitting time sheets, etc -- which would be fraud -- just that he stopped showing up and, at some point, allegedly threatened a (previous) manager, who's now retired, to keep quite. He decided to not look a gift hospital in the wallet...

    • Yeah I too think it could get into a grey area, if he hadnâ(TM)t threatened his boss I would agree that he ought to be allowed to say he was available to them if they needed him. It is not really his fault they had no work for him. A lot of consultant jobs involve getting paid while you sit on the bench to be available when youâ(TM)re needed. The twist here is that he threatened a manager, THAT makes it a crime because he is forcing them to pay him. I suspect that Italy would be charging him eve

  • He may have had connections that made his threats credible, and mangers decided that tuning a blind eye was better then turning up dead.

  • "Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. He took me to his cabin and he told me his secret. 'I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts' he said. 'My name is Ryan; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired 15 years and living like a king in Patagonia.' "

  • Manager retires and the new manager and HR never notice he's never around, for 15 years? That's some office.

  • Sometimes it is cheaper to simply tell the incompetent worker to not bother to show up than it is to fire it. (When I was at Rockwell in Anaheim in the 70s there was a well known such case.)

    {o.o}

  • Not only do you have to do a timesheet, but also enterprise management BS where you have to record the projects cost centre code. These codes change often, and appear to be an HR invention just to catch fraud, or outright laziness. Incompetence on the job was OK, but you WOULD be dismissed for not doing your EPM.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      Not only do you have to do a timesheet, but also enterprise management BS where you have to record the projects cost centre code.
      These codes change often, and appear to be an HR invention just to catch fraud, or outright laziness. Incompetence on the job was OK, but you WOULD be dismissed for not doing your EPM.

      If you make a mistake they'll tell you. Hey Bob, at the last employee lunchon we told everyone we'd be changing the charge code. Yours changed from "lazybum" to "NothereeverMF". Just fix your time card and resubmit please.

      They change codes not to catch people, it's to put a hard end to the old accounts. At some point they have to call it a day on a year's worth of numbers. Then they can crunch their monthly, quarterly and yearly numbers into a nice report for upper management to look at (and sometimes ignor

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