To refuse to provide bank statement to my work to prove I was in the office

[HanExplorer]

I’ve found myself in a very unusual situation and am standing firm so far despite pressure.

I work in a hybrid role with a requirement to attend our office twice a week, this is measured monthly based on card swipe data. On one of the days in May, I forgot my pass so was issued a temporary one to use that day.

Earlier this month my manager flagged I was showing a day short for office attendance in May and said I’d need to make up a further day in June. I looked at the dates they had on record and quickly realised the missing one was when I had the temporary pass so that obviously hadn’t registered on the system.

I explained this to my manager and she still maintained I’d need to attend an extra day to balance the totals on the system as there ‘wasn’t any record of me attending’.

I realised I’d spent money in the on site restaurant that day and there’d be a record on my bank showing the company name. I screenshotted this on my phone, cropped it so you could see the date and sent it to my manager.

She has checked with her manager and told me that I need to provide a copy of a bank statement which shows my name and the transaction - that would of course also show all my other activity!!

This has been dragging on and I’m standing firm so far, but I’ve had a call booked in with my manager and her manager for tomorrow and I’m wary of what they are going to say.

My office is over an hours train journey each way so not a case of driving 5 minutes down the road to work a further day - regardless, I don’t feel I should do out of principle.

This is ridiculous but honestly OP, just bloody PRINT a statement, redact using a marker pen. It’s not rocket science 😂

She's not a tricky bugger just because, unlike some of the meek little peons on here, she's not willing to acquiesce to an outrageous request which has only come about because of the absurd micromanagement and lack of trust from her employer.

Some of you really love the boot on your neck, don't you?

OR… redact it online and screenshot it before sending.

Honestly OP, you’re making a huge ginormous mountain out of a fucking grain of sand.

Some of us really love our pay cheque at the end of the month. And are prepared to behave reasonably to get it. If OP ends up without a job and a question mark over her honesty she’ll have nobody but herself to blame. I don’t imagine for a moment that this is her first rodeo of conflict with her employer.

That "proof" should be a system which records who has been issued a temporary pass on a given day, or in any grown-up office it should just be taken on trust that if an employee explains why the swipe record on their own ID card wasn't registered that is the end of it.

It absolutely should not be the case that the employee is accused of lying and to prove otherwise has to hand over personal information - however trivial you may think that information is. This is a complete failure of a company to perform a very basic task such as keeping track of who is in their own office on any given day, that's the cause of all of this.

Yes. This.
Let us know how the meeting goes @HanExplorer

That's grand as long as they change the policy for everyone; otherwise, that's discrimination.

Yes this. If there are consequences for forgetting the pass then they apply to everyone right up to the ceo, or the op has a black and white constructive dismissal case.

Not sure why you think your opinion is some kind of holy law we have to follow.

I’ll say it again, all of you who are on the side of OP are part of the toxic work culture we have. Surely you’re not all “no” people who make every single interaction as difficult as possible on some invented “principle”?

OP hasn’t refused to give proof, she has said she has already supplied the evidence of the on site purchase via a screen shot of the bank record. The manager won’t accept it and wants the corresponding bank statement. Did you miss this ? Did you also miss that it wasn’t the manager insisting, but is a policy issue from senior management ?

If OP was issued a temporary pass then there should be a record of it. If she can prove she was onsite when she says she was - which she clearly can or she wouldn’t have been able to produce the screen shot - then the failure is on the part of the the employer. In the event of a fire or other emergency they would have been unaware she was on the premises, which in itself is a serious issue, and one which needs to be addressed. They cannot simply put the onus back on the employee to prove they were at work and insist on them working an extra day if they can’t.

Many people are making out that OP is the problem and she’s not trusted - despite nothing in her posts indicating that this is the case, beyond people reading between the lines. If senior management have issued a directive of this kind, it suggests a more widespread abuse of the systems than just OP. If I had provided the proof by way of a screen shot of bank records I’d be mightily pissed off to then be asked for the full bank statement, which is personal and private information, and nothing to do with them. If they continue to insist then I’d be asking for it to be returned when they’d recorded the proof they needed.

The ridiculous thing is that OP's employers aren't even saying that she didn't actually do any work that day, but that she didn't work in the place where they have decreed that their employees must work two days per week.

The fact that nobody saw or interacted with OP in person while she was in the office is proof that her physical presence wasn't even needed that day and that this is just a box-ticking exercise. If OP was a manager and needed to have face to face meetings with her staff that day, her presence in the office would be a requirement. And, if that was the case, OP would have had witnesses to prove that she was in the office.

If it were me, I would print out a bank statement and use a marker pen to redact all the other entries, just to prove them wrong. However, forgetting a pass is a common occurrence in most workplaces and the expectation would be that the issue of a temporary pass (and its return at the end of the day) would be logged purely from a security perspective.

You're missing the point. She has shown the screenshot, offered to speak to the CCTV personnel, and has already said 'yes' several times. Her manager has given woolly excuses for not reviewing the CCTV footage and is now asking for a bank statement, all because they don't believe the OP and, by the sounds of it, have no secure way of tracking who was using a temporary pass.

How is it an invented principle to not want your employer to have a copy of your bank statement to prove something you’ve already given them proof of in a screenshot of the transaction in question from your online banking ? What do they need the full statement for ? The principle here is that the employer can’t verify that she was on the premises on the stated day, even though she had a temporary pass. That’s a fairly serious security issue. What if there had been an emergency - they wouldn’t have been aware OP was even there. And what of the work she did that day ? Are they refusing to pay her for work done because they’re saying she wasn’t in the right place to do it ?

I don’t know why so many posters cannot understand why the screenshot doesn’t prove anything?

It’s been covered quite extensively so you’re essentially opening comments with “I haven’t bothered to inform myself before giving my opinion” - it just means your entire comment gets ignored.

Why are people announcing they’ve not paid any attention?

Read through the thread. This has been asked and answered close to a dozen times.

It’s an invented principle because the bank statement will only show the employer information they already have on the OP (her bank, her account number, her sort code, her name - all already held by the employer) and the transaction (which is what OP wants them to know is true).

There’s no privacy concern because 100% of the information being provided is something they either already have or that OP explicitly wants them to know. So her “privacy” principle in invented.

What is on her bank statement, when redacted, that the employer doesn’t already hold? The only thing the bank statement proves is that it’s true (if it were true).

It’s like saying you’re happy to tell someone your name, you degree, your degree grade, when you graduated and the university you went to but you won’t show them your degree certificate for privacy reasons…

Not the point.

The point is that nobody should be required to share personal information - no matter how trivial that information you may think that information is - with anyone without good reason, and certainly not to cover up the fact that her employer:

• Has shit systems in place re: keeping track of who is in their building.
• Does not trust an employee when they provide a perfectly reasonable explaination as to why there was no swipe record on their ID for 1 day.

Your example of not showing a degree certificate isn't the same thing, at all.

Everything you’ve said has already been responded to several times on the thread already.

She is not being asked to share personal information- she can redact everything other than the transaction she is relying on to prove she was in the office.

I suspect their systems are fine and they KNOW the OP wasn’t in the office that day. They’re certainly going to a hell
of a lot of trouble over it. She could have sorted this out really quickly if she was in the office, had she wanted to.

Maybe the OP is looking to MN to come up with a clever way of getting out of this situation rather than just working the extra day in the office?

the employer holds account details. the manager does not.

This is 100% it. OP wasn’t in the office.

My guess is that she went in on one day. When challenged, lied about the temp pass. Then noticed the incorrect clearing date for lunch, or got it from a colleague, and added that “evidence” too. Now they’ve asked to see the transaction date and her name and she knows she’ll be caught for lying if she provides it.

If OP had been honest at the start, she’d just have had to make up the day. But now she’s lied, that’s gross misconduct and she’ll be sacked.

I’ve never seen someone who’s telling the truth and acting in good faith just flat-out refuse to prove it for absolutely no reason at all.

The manager knows her name… she can redact the rest.

Nope. It’s the principle that the employer uses systems that are so lax that a temporary security pass can be issued and not recorded that’s the issue here. They’re putting the onus on the employee to prove they were at work, when the employers own system should have reflected the attendance on the temporary pass. The employer should know who is on their premises at any given time, for both safety reasons in case of emergency, and for the general safety and security of their employees if these passes are also being issued to non-employees visiting the premises.

I missed that OP had cropped her screenshot, so yes, I agree that that’s an issue and it’s easy enough to highlight the transaction in online banking to bring up more individual details on it, so a screenshot of the full transaction with the details they required should have been possible. It’s the reason they needed to ask for it that’s the issue.

It is personal information. It's details of her bank account. That's personal, even if you think it's trivial.

Basic information security says you do not request information like that unless you absolutely need to, and this is not an example of that. All this request is showing is that OP's employer has shit systems and does not trust their employees. That's not somewhere I would work.

OP has already been on to say that her company do not have a record of who is issued a temporary pass. I mean, if you choose not to believe that, that's fine, but at face value OP absolutely has a right to tell her employer to fuck off with this request.

Yes, it has, with the same nonsense argument of "oh, just give them the statement" when the point being made and repeatedly being missed by you is that OP absolutely should not have to.