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.

Print one out & blank out anything you don’t want them to see
easily fixed

you asked if people felt you were being unreasonable, a lot of people said they felt you were, and the ones who agreed are now your ‘fan club’. 33 pages of this utter shite fgs.

Common sense wins! Well done for standing your ground.

Awesome work OP. Well done!

Well done. There is no reason for you to have to provide personal information to prove attendance. Furthermore, I would say that it is actually their responsibility to provide evidence of non-attendance.

You can’t prove a negative.

Yes easy to fix but OP obviously wants to have a drama 🙄

What a workplace, although your lucky you can work from home

I would redact the bank statement and send them that, but there's a bigger issue at play here, IMO.

It's clear that your manager/employer does not trust your word. I have mandated office attendance too, and it's picked up via the computer system tracking where I log in. If, for some reason, my computer failed to connect to the appropriate connection, and my attendance wasn't picked up-my manager would trust my word that I was in the office that day and it was a computer glitch.

I'm not sure I'd like to work in such an environment where my word was being scrutinised without good cause. Obviously-if this kind of stuff was regularly occurring, then, yes, they're going to be more suspicious, but as a one off? It's absolutely questionable that your manager is refusing to accept your word for it.

Professional relationships are built on trust and it's clear that there is none here.

IT should be able to tell whether you were logged onto the corporate WiFi in the office rather than via VPN, etc from home.

I realise that I am commenting after everything has been settled - but how stupid is this?

1. If the issue can be settled by the canteen transaction, the employer should be able to verify the transaction as a receipt to their bank account.

2. The employee can print the bank statement onto a piece of paper and then cut off anything that they don't want visible.

This is all so stupid that it can only be a government employer.

I would raise a grievance with HR, it is unreasonable that they are asking you to provide this level of proof when their internal systems aren’t functioning correctly. Big red flag for toxicity. Can’t understand everyone saying that it’s up to you to redact a personal bank statement - not it’s not it’s up to them to prove you didn’t work, and they can’t because their systems for monitoring the temporary pass don’t work.

why would those disagreeing with you now be served humble pie? I don't think you understand what that expression means. It's when someone is proved wrong and has to admit it - just because your management has backed down doesn't mean our opinion that you were being ridiculous wasn't correct. You can't disprove an opinion.

The majority of the votes might be agreeing with you because you vote after just reading the OP - rather than your further posts where your cyber working DP doesn't seem to know how to filter bank statements or how screenshots work, and you rejected every straightforward suggestion on how to easily prove your

also not sure why you've decided there's a correlation between people who thought YABU and those who are jealous of your hybrid job - FWIW I wfh.

Then if she can't be proven guilty then there is no case.

Not that you need it now, but your DP was right to raise concerns about reverse-engineering a redacted document. As others suggested, you might have been able to filter every transaction except that one for a custom statement. If you need a redacted one, you can usually generate a PDF statement. I'd save that, export each page as a JPEG, paste the JPEG(s) into a word, image or presentation editor, redact it, save the result as 'print to PDF', export that as JPEG, then 'print to PDF' once more. You finally have a redacted PDF statement that can't be reverse-engineered (or there's other ways you might know better). Then send it securely and internally. Any corrections gratefully received.

But she can. Because there’s zero evidence that she was at work. And you can prove a positive.

Disagree - she wants to have dignity, it’s about being treated with respect by employers. Anyone who would roll over and agree to sharing a bank statement to prove they were in work is an absolute mug!

Our temp passes are written on a sheet so they’d know on the day if there was a fire alarm who was there but I’m fairly certain that’s not data they need to keep long term so it probably goes in the bin at the end of the week.

OP should just give the info needed or work the extra day and know to not forget her pass again.

Common sense would have been just complying with the request using a redacted statement. Now OP will be noted as a total pain in the arse, and it is unlikely to help her progress in her career. Cutting off your nose to spite your face is what this brings to mind.

Just print it out and black. Out all other transactions. Simple

There is zero evidence because they have unreliable processes or they can't be bothered.
They could check the canteen transactions and the cctv.
They should keep records of who has signed for a temporary pass.

They could also check the IP address of where she logged on to her computer.

Or she wasn’t there.

Start sending her passive aggressive thumbs up selfies with the security guard everything you go in

Yes, one can quite see why a company wouldn't want to draw attention to such a lack of organisation. Even if OP were lying, the fact that they lack adequate processes to work out whether someone was in is piss up and brewery territory. Best swept under the rug.