George Wallace said:
All necessary for legal reasons. If a Forensic Audit has to be done, those documents must be available. Monitor Mass would not prove the validity of such claims/payments, if it could be proven that Monitor Mass could be 'corrupted' by a less than ethical person who may be committing fraud or embezzling from the CAF.
Paper documents are no less corruptible than digital copies, if anything, digital copies are less corruptible, upload a copy to a read only archive as soon as it's produced, and if there's any mismatch, then you've had tampering, vs a paper copy, that sits on someone's desk for a few weeks before it gets filed locally.
Archiving digital documents as quite easy, and they're no less valid for audits. Maintenance records are typically produced and stored digitally now, and quite important as a record to prove maintenance, and thus due diligence was performed.
At the same time, if we were to go to a digital system for pay, we'd eliminate a lot of hassle, no more lost pay sheets, no more pay sheets from exercises that got forgotten in somone's jacket for a month. Sure there'll be teething issues, and sure there'll be issues related to software/hardware, but as long as there's an option for the paper backup you'll be fine.
I used to deal with the same crap from my civillian employer (I no longer work for those folks). We filled our our hours in books of carbon paper, and any ammendments were marked "ammendent" and also filled out in carbon paper... IF the pay sheets made it to the office before the next pay run, and IF they got processed by the one lonely clerk buried under a pile of pay sheets, and IF they didn't get misplaced/lost, you MIGHT get your over time in 6 weeks.
Vs my new employer, as long as I've got everything emailed in by 3:30 on Friday, I get paid by 6:00 that same after noon.
Now, with old employer, everyone griped about the delay to get paid over time/allowances etc, but when the subject of going over to spread sheets, there was a huge opposition to it, you wouldn't believe how absurd most of the arguments were against it, mostly it all boiled down to the majority of the employees being arbitrarily fearful of change, and computer illiterate... add to that any time computerized systems were introduced, they seldom lived up to expectations, not because they weren't effective systems, but because the employer provided no training on how to use the systems (our maintenance work order system being a prime example, great piece of software, and those of us who endeavored to sit down on our own time after hours with the manual had no problems with it... but it was pretty much useless, because very few of us were willing to take the unreasonable measure of wasting our own time to learn to use the new system when the employer wouldn't spring for a few hours of over time for training. The employer wants you to use the system, the employer needs to train you to use the system)
Edit: Come to think of it, it's the same as this monitor mass crap that keeps being posted. I've been told all sorts of wonderful things about monitor mass, but I've never had, and never will have any training on it. I've also been told that there's a tutorial included with the software, and I should go through the tutorial. Except I get three hours a week to do my job, which includes doing the jobs of two other people. Finding one of very few computers in a reserve unit, then waiting an hour for it to log in, and another hour for monitor mass to load, is low on my priority list, and coming in on my own time to do it is even lower on the priority list.
); yet the Reserves doesn't seem to have collapsed under the weight of fraudulent sign-ins or abysmal penmanship.
