Does your teleworkers' OT cost you?

Because telework agreements traditionally don’t prevent federal employees from working overtime and the nature of such arrangements often lends themselves to workers being plugged in more than their assigned hours, Robert Dietrich of FedSmith recommends that advanced approval from a supervisor should be required for all OT.

In fact, telework can bring about problems with compliance when it comes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA) and a Defense Department audit agency, for example, mandates that OT and comp time cannot be approved without assigning a special controlnumber to it so that it can be recorded, the article said.

According to FLSA, all nonexempt telework employees arerequired to be paid for all hours of "suffer or permit" work during authorized time periods, whether or notthe agency knows or should have known about it.

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