1099 Contract employee

Is the contract employee paid hourly or are they on salary?

If it's salary - I'd say the contract employee would be due the case-authorized limit.

You do know there are 4.3 weeks per month, not 4, correct?

Hourly.

Yes, I do.

I would also know how to allocate my time that for weeks that slip into the 5th week, I would have arranged it so that I didn't go past the limit authorized by the state.

To give some background....

I got a part time billing job I really love, so this stuff isn't complaining, I'm trying to plug some holes in the dike for the owner. The person who had this job before me also worked full time, and I think it was all she could do to keep her head above water, let alone enforce guidelines. Billing is twice a month with a strict deadline, so it's a slam, the rest of the time is relaxed. 80-90% of the work can be done at home, any time day or night. It averages about 60 to 65 hours every 4.33334 weeks.

Everyone is contract, including me. A therapist is given clients and informed for example that so and so is authorized for X amount of hours a month to be seen 3 hours at a time. Most of the therapists are no problem. They work for different companies and manage their time just fine. But there's always that handful of people who can't understand why the world doesn't hold their hand and wipe their ass for them.

The bottom line is no one has held them accountable for the fact they are working unauthorized session that the company can't bill for. I've got some ideas I want to bounce off the owner and my manager. Thinking about it, if you are contract and informed this case is for 12 hours a month, the idea of going in over that time would in my opinion must be getting done out of the goodness of their heart.

One of my ideas would be to purchase everyone a cheap pocket calendar, with the instructions "use this so you know when you are nearing your monthly limits."

It doesn't matter if they use it or not. We can say "Why aren't you using the tool we gave you and told you to use?" If they choose not to use it, not our problem. The thing is, why should we pay you for those hours when you had a perfectly good method given to you that would have avoided this?

No one has ever been tracking how much this costs the company, or who are the usual suspects beyond a verbal "Bob's always a problem" Last week I happened to run into the owner when I stopped by the office, and said "Oh! Don't worry about that huge amount of money that got kicked back (I think around $6000). That's when I first did the billing on my own, and forgot to sign the invoices, and they got kicked back. Her response "Oh? I didn't even look." She was the one that GAVE me those kickbacks, and she hadn't even looked?

For fun this evening, I just started a spreadsheet tracking who what where when. In the last month, they have been unable to bill for between $700 and $800 of service, yet have just gone ahead and paid the contract employee. **** me.

This is gonna stop.

yup

that's how it was when I worked in a similar kind of situation

the company paying told my employer what the total billable was - they assigned people so their billable hours ended up at the exact total. anything people did beyond that was not payable to the person doing the work. people smartened up quickly - or decided they'd provide counselling for free. only a very few went the providing free services route.
___

a quick memo confirming that's how it worked - that was all it took

managers offered to be available to assist people who had trouble with their schedules

Ok, funny story.

I don't do anything with payroll. However, when the therapists drop off their notes, they include their timecards. I do look them over to make sure the numbers match, before turning them over to the payroll person. Mostly math errors and such.

Anyway, first payday, "Mary" informs us that she didn't get paid. I kinda freak out a little internally thinking "What did I do with that?" I had nothing on her for my side either. All I could do was apologize and tell her to give us copies. I felt bad, but couldn't figure out how I could miss an entire person.

Since then, I've started tracking lots of stuff, one of them being cross checking notes, time, names, total hours to make sure everything is accounted for. I know I'm putting in extra hours, but right now it is "out of the goodness of my heart" and also because I know down the line it's going to save hours. Plus, this is my idea of fun. Yeah, I know.

Anyway, this Mary informs us AGAIN she wasn't paid. Chatting with the old biller, I had found out Mary is a problem child.

Hey, not everyone works every week. I'm not a babysitter. You don't hand in time and notes, I figure you went on vacation or had no clients.

We were emailing each other back and forth and I nicely told her that. That I wasn't going to be calling someone to see if they didn't do something. Her response was "Oh. I was always called when I didn't turn something in. I'm accustomed to someone doing that for me. Any time I was called about it was in weeks I hadn't worked anyway, but I was given the opportunity to turn something in if I forgot."

After I stopped gasping from laughter, I answered her "If every time you were called you indeed had not worked, then that was a needless call. I would never want to give the impression to anyone that I don't think they're responsible enough to be accountable for their own paperwork. So, if nothings turned in, I'm going to assume you had nothing to give us." No response to that.

The woman before me was just so busy, what with this being a 2nd job, she'd just given up on thinking adults should be able to manage themselves, and became a nanny to a few of them. It's coming around.

Then I'll ask for a big fat raise.

Anyway. It just doesn't make sense to pay someone for their not adhering to the parameters given as far a number of hours.

Hourly makes it a little trickier, but it's still enforceable if the contract is well-written.

We have a contract worker who has 12 hours per month. She has "banked" over-hours and just applies them to the next month.

That's not going to work with therapists who are working with clients under a state contract.

Plus, I can't imagine how confusing that would get with the number of therapists and clients. Who would lose? The clients. Oh, sorry, you can't be seen for the next 2 weeks because your provider doesn't know how to look at a calendar.


This has to start getting done right, not look for ways to do workarounds.