I work in an emergency room registration department. The job involves updating peoples' information such as address/phone number/insurance/etc. If we don't get it right, the hospital doesn't get paid.
I have a coworker, we will call her Barbara. She works on different shift than me, so I have not worked along side her very often. But on the few occasions that I have, I have noticed she is
totally faking her work. It is really easy to tell. We will be sitting at the desk, and a patient will suddenly become "complete" in the computer system, even though she never talked to the patient!
On 2 occasions I have reported this to the managers. The last time (about 6 months ago), not much happened. That manager was ineffective anyway and got fired. I hadn't worked with this coworker for a long time and was hoping she wasn't still doing it, but when I worked with her one day last week, I caught her in several acts of faking her accounts. I gathered my evidence and emailed my managers.
The managers said they would take care of it. It appears they did, however they failed to keep me anonymous and this coworker now knows that I'm the one who ratted her out.
IMO if I were her, I would be scared of losing my job, and I would do a really good job from then on. But she decided to SEND ME AN EMAIL.
Here's the email:
If you have any question on what I have done or have not done please bring it to me not management and if WE can’t fix it between us then WE will involve them. If you find a problem with my audits please send me a email and I will see about fixing it myself. If you have any questions or concerns about this email or anything else please don’t hesitate to ask ME.
Great. I feel sick to my stomach about this whole thing. All I am trying to do is do the right thing, and now I have a coworker who is mad at me, and I am scared she is going to do some mud slinging. The problem is I do the best job I can at work, so there is not much she can dig up on me, unless she blatantly makes stuff up.
IMO it is NOT "just between me and her", because I have no right to say to her "why didn't you go talk to those patients?". She is grossly faking her work, and IMO, that means it is totally between her and the boss.
So, did I respond to her email?
No, I did not. I think she needs to sit with some anxiety for a little while. She know she did something wrong. (Lots of somethings, for a long period of time). Plus, I have nothing to say to her anyway.
I actually forwarded the email to my managers, with the attached note:
Please see below. I feel sick to my stomach about this. I have some “words of wisdom”, to put it nicely, to say to Barbara but I am going to hold my tongue. I don’t really know what to do at this point. I think I am just going to ignore her email. I don’t feel like it is just between me and her if she is grossly faking her work. I don’t have the authority to say to her “Why didn’t you talk to these patients?”
I don’t know if I should still advise you if I notice any more problems with her? I have done my part and notified management twice about this issue with this employee.
Please advise.
So RYL, did I do the right thing? Why am I feeling so crappy right now? Why am I scared she is going to try to confront me one-on-one when I get to work tomorrow? And if she does, what should I say to her, if anything?
I'm not even going to try to prepare for it, if she does confront me, I'm just going to improvise and try to do the best I can.
As my fiancee said to me, taking the high road is lonely. I feel pretty crap right now, but I still feel it was important to do the right thing and turn her in. So I just have to stick with that and battle it out, whatever the "consequences" may be.
Thanks for your help & advice
-Bob
