Don't Tempt The "Temps"

A regular column, Personnel Vignettes is submitted by various personnel executives without attribution at their request.

A few years ago our consumer credit department found itself understaffed during the summer months. In order to help meet the shortage, we brought in several temporary employees who were referred from an outside agency.

One of these "temps" was assigned to receipting payments on car loans. The job was to receive batches of payments and enter the check amounts and other data in a computer terminal to record the payments received. Our temp settled in quickly and was soon carrying a near-normal workload.

One day the unit supervisor discovered that the temporary worker's accounts did not settle. In checking over her work, he discovered two payment coupons in the work for which no checks had been credited. A search failed to uncover the missing checks.

Suspicious that the temp may have held the missing checks out of the work without also removing the matching coupons, he quietly began giving her work which had been previously processed and settled by other clerks. Sure enough, a few days later, two other payments turned up missing from the work she was given to process.

Confronted, the temp admitted that she had been diverting a number of customer payments. She had already altered and negotiated several of the lifted checks and, eventually, we had a loss in excess of $2,500.

The human resources department checks out regular employees very carefully but we had made no effort to do the same with the temporary employees we hired, nor is it really feasible for us to do so. The department could have used better judgment in assigning a temp to such sensitive work without very close supervision, or audit procedures which would have uncovered this situation immediately.

We were unable to recover the missing checks but we hoped to recover our monetary loss. This proved possible in this case because we were able to make a demand on the temporary agency, which made good on the loss. The employees of some temporary agencies are bonded to indemnify the agency against losses which may be caused by their employees in the performance of their duties and we were able to collect under that bond.

We learned our lesson and now deal only with bonded temporary agencies for just this reason.

There are several things you can do to protect yourself against the possibility of loss when dealing with temporary agencies:

Make up a short list of temporary agencies you will deal with and deal only with those agencies listed. Qualify these agencies for your list only after an investigation which will assure you that (a) the agency can supply your needs (b) that it carefully checks out the people it refers and (c) that it is covered by a bond which will cover any losses which may be incurred through the use of its employees.

Insist that new temporary workers assigned to you complete a brief form giving you their names, addresses, Social Security numbers and several personal references as well as where they had been previously employed. This information will provide you with leads to follow in finding them in the event of a loss. Don't rely on the agency to give you this information.

Take care in the kind of work to which you assign temporary workers and make certain they are supervised more closely than you might supervise a regular employee. Don't put yourself at risk: at least some temporaries are working as temps because they have problems in their work histories which prevent them from finding regular full-time employment.

Copyright © 1990 Bankers' Hotline. Originally appeared in Bankers' Hotline, Vol. 1, No. 11, 11/90