Correction fluid on time records: Canary Islands TSJ upholds €15,250 fine against SUFI

The High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands has dismissed the appeal (suplicación) brought by SUFI, S.A. – Hermanos Santana Cazorla UTE Telde against a first-instance judgment that had partially upheld a Labour Inspectorate fine for irregularities in the company’s time record. The ruling is STSJ ICAN 629/2026 of 14 April 2026 (judgment by Poyatos Matas J.), and it nudges the final amount upwards on the cross-appeal from the regional government: the definitive fine stands at €15,250, not the €13,500 set below. The difference is an arithmetical slip the Canary Islands TSJ corrects on the back of the cross-appeal lodged by the regional Ministry of Employment.

The evidential core of the case is physical. The signature sheets on the time record had been corrected with TIPEX (correction fluid) in 15 of the 44 workers on the contract, and in many cases the workers themselves were not the ones filling them in. On that footing, the Inspectorate documented systematic, structural night overtime that went unpaid throughout the period under investigation.

Who the joint venture is, and what the contract covered

SUFI Hermanos Cazorla UTE Telde is a temporary joint venture (UTE) constituted under Law 19/1982. From 1 February 2020 it took over the street cleaning, beach cleaning and municipal solid-waste collection services for the Telde municipality in Gran Canaria. This is a public contract of meaningful size: the judgment records that the company’s turnover between February and October 2020 was €3,673,750.49, with an operating result for the period of –€994,502.88.

The service has a structural night component — heavy street cleaning is normally carried out outside business hours — and that is precisely where a large part of the evidential problem clusters.

What the Labour Inspectorate found

On 24 March 2021 the Labour and Social Security Inspectorate (ITSS) served the joint venture with a notice requiring rectification within four months for several deficiencies: improper accounting of overtime, no monthly or annual totals for actual working time in 2020, night work uncompensated by the corresponding salary supplement, and a failure to contribute social security on overtime and night hours. Two days later, on 26 March 2021, the Inspectorate issued a notice of infringement identifying four pieces of conduct and proposing an initial fine of €21,900:

1. Failure to record and total the daily collective working time accurately, in breach of the prohibition on overtime for staff hired under article 12.4 c) of the Workers’ Statute — €6,250.
2. Failure to record overtime accurately — €6,250.
3. Performance of structural overtime — €4,000.
4. Performance of overtime during night hours — €5,000.

(The headline figure in the initial notice was €21,900, the result of an arithmetic error that the administration itself rectified in a later clarifying resolution, leaving the total at the €21,500 that the four line items actually add up to.)

The material findings recorded by the inspector — which the judgment treats as proven — include, in their own words:

• “The signature sheets on the time record appear corrected with ‘TIPEX’ in 15 workers out of 44” (fifth finding of fact).
• “The company has performed overtime during night hours” (twelfth finding of fact).
• “In many cases the workers themselves do not fill in either the daily time record or the overtime record” (thirteenth finding of fact).
• “During the period under investigation, January to June 2020, 40 workers performed overtime of a structural nature” (fourteenth finding of fact).

That picture is heavily documented in the notice and was reinforced at trial by the acting inspector, who appeared as a witness. The bench notes that her evidence, combined with the presumption of accuracy in article 53.2 of the Workplace Infringements and Sanctions Act (RDL 5/2000), closes off any meaningful dispute about the facts.

From the inspection notice to the TSJ’s €15,250: a procedural timeline

The administrative and judicial route is long, and it is worth tracking step by step because the TSJ’s final correction lives inside it.

• 26 March 2021 — ITSS notice of infringement: €21,900 (with an arithmetic error).
• 19 May 2021 — Resolution by the Head of Employment Services: confirms the fine at €21,900 and rejects the company’s submissions.
• 2 June 2021 — Clarifying resolution: corrects the arithmetical error and fixes the fine at €21,500.
• 7 June 2021 — The company, without waiting for the clarifying resolution, lodges an administrative appeal against the 19 May ruling.
• 2 September 2021 — The Director General of Labour dismisses the appeal.
• 22 September 2021 — Company and works council agree to amend the collective agreement so that the time record is kept on paper (eleventh finding of fact).
• 18 September 2025 — First-instance judgment (Court No. 8, Las Palmas Court of First Instance, Labour Division): partially upholds the joint venture’s claim, annuls the third infringement (structural overtime, €4,000) and moderates downwards the first (from €6,250 to €4,000). Total declared: €13,500.
• 14 April 2026 — STSJ ICAN 629/2026: dismisses SUFI’s appeal, partially upholds the regional government’s cross-appeal to correct the arithmetical error in the first-instance ruling, sets the fine at €15,250, awards costs of €800 and decrees forfeiture of the deposit lodged for the appeal.

The TSJ spells out the final arithmetic itself: €21,500 (the clarifying resolution) minus €2,250 (the moderation of the first infringement from €6,250 to €4,000) minus €4,000 (the annulled third infringement) equals €15,250, not €13,500. The first-instance error had slipped into the operative part of the ruling but not into the legal reasoning, so the TSJ corrects it via the regional government’s cross-appeal without touching the rest.

Why the inspection notice survives appellate review

SUFI built its case on two central grounds: procedural nullity, and errors in how the evidence on the alleged TIPEX tampering had been weighed. The judgment rejects both with reasoning that companies running paper systems should read slowly.

The first plank is the presumption of accuracy conferred on Inspectorate notices by article 53.2 of RDL 5/2000. The bench cites settled Supreme Court authority (Supreme Court judgments of 15 January 1990, 12 February 2000, 23 July 1990, 5 October 1990, 23 April 1994 and 10 July 1995) and clarifies that the presumption covers both facts the inspector observed directly during the site visit and those obtained through witness statements, documents or other validly gathered evidence, provided they are recorded in the notice. The presumption is iuris tantum — open to rebuttal — but the burden of rebuttal sits with the company, and SUFI did not discharge it.

The second is immediacy. The acting inspector gave evidence at trial as a witness, and the first-instance judge weighed her testimony together with the documents the company produced. The TSJ recalls that immediacy gives the trial court sovereignty over the appraisal of the evidence, and that appraisal is only revisited on appeal where there is a manifest error that destroys the conclusion — not where a party simply disagrees with the weight the trial court attached to a piece of evidence.

The third argument is editorially the most interesting. SUFI complained that the Inspectorate should have brought a criminal complaint for documentary forgery if it genuinely believed the records had been falsified. The bench answers head-on:

“…the absence of any criminal complaint against the employer for forgery arising from the manipulation of time records is not a legal prerequisite for the imposition of an administrative penalty such as the one before us.”

In other words: an administrative fine for tampering with the time record does not require the criminal offence of documentary forgery to have been proven in criminal proceedings. It is enough that the administration documents the tampering, describes it in the notice and reasons it in the resolution. Some defences explore the parallel between administrative sanction and criminal reproach as a way of raising the evidential threshold; the Canary Islands TSJ closes that route explicitly.

The works council agreement does not launder the earlier sheets

There is one procedural subtlety worth pausing on. In September 2021 — six months after the inspection notice — the joint venture’s management and the workers’ legal representatives signed an agreement under which the time record would be kept on paper, ratifying that medium under article 34.9 of the Workers’ Statute. In its claim, the company leaned on that agreement to argue that the choice of paper was lawful and that, on that basis, the alleged irregularities could not attract a fine.

The bench disposes of the point without fanfare: the agreement with the workers’ representatives covers the choice of medium, not breaches in how it is filled in. Failure to record accurately, TIPEX corrections, unaggregated night overtime and the fact that workers were not the ones completing the sheets are substantive breaches of articles 34.9 and 35.5 of the Workers’ Statute that persist regardless of the medium chosen.

There is a second layer. The agreement was signed in September 2021, while the fine relates to an earlier period (January to June 2020). A subsequent agreement with the workers’ representatives cannot cure material irregularities that had already taken place and been documented in an inspection notice.

Two friction points the Inspectorate spots without effort

Street cleaning, security, hospitality and logistics share an operating pattern: night work or rotating shifts, geographically dispersed staff, large headcounts with many signatures to coordinate, and legacy paper systems signed at the start or end of the shift. The SUFI case highlights two concrete friction points.

The first concerns who actually fills in the paper. When workers do not sign themselves, or when someone else fills in the sheets on their behalf, the record loses the reliability article 34.9 of the Workers’ Statute demands, regardless of what has been agreed with the works council on the medium. The Canary Islands inspector documented this expressly — “in many cases the workers themselves do not fill in the record” — and the bench treats it as proven.

The second concerns the traceability of corrections. A sheet patched with TIPEX gives no visibility on what changed, when it changed, who changed it or why. Evidentially, that opacity turns the record into a document the inspector can reject as a unilateral instrument and the judge can contrast against witness evidence to conclude that actual working time differed from what was logged. The Catalan TSJ judgment on time records with cross-outs as insufficient evidence that we covered a few weeks ago follows exactly the same reasoning in the labour jurisdiction’s overtime claims.

How this fits the move to digital time tracking

The case lands in the closing stretch of the approval process for the new Royal Decree on Digital Time Tracking, expected before 21 June 2026. The draft expressly requires the record to be immutable — entries cannot be altered without joint authorisation from employer and worker — and every correction must be logged with author, date and reason. A well-designed digital system meets that requirement by default: every change sits in an audit log the Inspectorate can consult without having to judge the legibility of correction fluid on a photocopy.

For employers rewriting their time-record procedure to fit the Royal Decree in the coming months, the fines the Inspectorate is already imposing for irregularities in the time record are by now a tangible economic argument. The SUFI case adds a concrete data point: the judgment confirms five-figure penalties against a joint venture holding a €3.67 million public contract, in a period where the operating result was already negative. Fines do not arrive when the business is doing well.

Two days ago we covered another Canary Islands TSJ case with a different angle but the same root — CIRCET’s time-record procedure was rendered void for failing to open consultations with the workers’ representatives. Two Canary Islands rulings inside four weeks set the direction of travel.

If the goal is to see how immutable traceability translates into the daily operations of a service with night shifts, a 15-minute demo shows the audit log working on real clock-ins.

What to watch next

The ruling is not final: a cassation appeal for unification of doctrine lies to the Labour Division of the Supreme Court within ten days of notification. The Canary Islands bench also orders SUFI to pay €800 in costs on the appeal and decrees the forfeiture of the deposit lodged for the appeal.

Setting aside any cassation appeal, what the ruling consolidates at appellate level is that the presumption of accuracy in article 53.2 of RDL 5/2000 extends to material findings about the physical medium of the time record, not only to facts the inspector observed in person during the visit. For companies with large headcounts and paper systems, the reputational and financial cost of a five-figure fine tends to dwarf the cost of migrating the record to a digital system with traceability built in.

Frequently asked questions

How much weight does a paper time record carry before the Labour Inspectorate? Paper remains a lawful medium under the current article 34.9 of the Workers’ Statute, but its evidential value depends entirely on the record being reliable, accurate and complete. Where sheets show cross-outs, TIPEX corrections, or where workers are not the ones filling them in, the Inspectorate can issue a notice of infringement for a serious offence, and the courts tend to uphold that reading because inspection notices enjoy a presumption of accuracy under article 53.2 of RDL 5/2000. The forthcoming Royal Decree on Digital Time Tracking, expected before 21 June 2026, will sideline paper as the principal medium for precisely this reason.

Does an agreement with the works council make a paper time record bulletproof? An agreement with the workers’ legal representatives on the medium for the record is valid under the current framework, but it only covers the choice of medium. It does not cure earlier breaches such as a failure to record accurately, unaggregated overtime, or physical tampering with the document. In SUFI’s case, the company and the works council agreed on paper in September 2021, yet the fine related to an earlier period (January to June 2020) and the agreement did not stop the TSJ from upholding the infringements.

How much can the Inspectorate fine for irregularities in the time record? For a serious infringement under article 7.5 of RDL 5/2000, fines run from €751 at the minimum tier to €7,500 at the maximum, graded by the number of workers affected, intent and recurrence. SUFI accumulated three serious infringements (failure to record working time accurately, failure to record overtime accurately, and night overtime with no social security contributions), totalling €15,250 after the first-instance court moderated one amount downwards and the TSJ later corrected an arithmetical error.

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Sources: judgment STSJ ICAN 629/2026 (ECLI:ES:TSJICAN:2026:629), available through CENDOJ. Notice of infringement of the Labour and Social Security Inspectorate dated 26 March 2021 and clarifying resolution of 2 June 2021 (referenced in the statement of facts). Articles 34.9, 35.5 and 36.1 of the Workers’ Statute (Estatuto de los Trabajadores); articles 7.5 and 5.1 of RDL 5/2000 (LISOS). Court excerpts translated from the Spanish original.

Image: a page from a handwritten logbook (1882-1884), by Edmund Percy Fenwick George Grant, cropped for this publication and distributed via Wikimedia Commons in the public domain. Illustrative photo of paper-based recordkeeping; it does not depict any SUFI documentation.

Legal notice: This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. The judgment is not final; a cassation appeal for unification of doctrine lies to the Labour Division of the Supreme Court within the statutory deadline.