An employee faked his clock-ins to skip work, and the High Court of Justice upholds his dismissal

The usual conversation about time tracking revolves around protecting the worker: unpaid overtime, the burden of proof that shifts when there is no record. Ruling STSJ Cataluña 4769/2026, dated 5 June, runs in the opposite direction. Here, time tracking serves to expose an employee who left his post and logged hours he had not worked.

The High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJ) has upheld the fair disciplinary dismissal (despido disciplinario procedente) of a Unit Head at the Ajuntament de la Llagosta, dismissing the worker’s appeal.

What happened

The worker, a social worker holding the position of Unit Head with seniority since 2007, had a 35-hour working week: five hours of mandatory presence between 9:00 and 14:00, and two hours of flexible scheduling. The workplace was the town hall itself.

Over ten working days in April and May 2023, he left his post without clocking out and, in several cases, logged times of presence that were not real. Some examples cited in the ruling:

• On 26 April his record showed a clock-out at 19:55, when he was no longer in the building.
• On 21 April he was inside for a little over two hours, but entered and left nine times, with stays lasting only minutes, without clocking out on six of those occasions.
• On 2 May he stayed inside for three hours and sixteen minutes; he spent the rest of the working day, according to the surveillance, mostly in bars.
• On 4 May he did not reach two hours inside the town hall.

The town hall already had a time-tracking system in which each person had to clock in on entering, clock out on leaving, and enter a code justifying every absence (code 78 for breakfast, 17 for work off-site, 44 for a medical visit, 26 for a personal matter). The employee left without logging any such entry.

Access control exposed the false clock-ins

The worker’s clock-ins, on their own, proved nothing: they had been manipulated to look normal. What gave him away was comparing them with the building’s access control, an independent record of physical entries and exits that he did not operate. Where his record read “present until 19:55”, the access control showed he had left hours earlier.

That contradiction between two records—one the worker could manipulate, the other not—is what turns a suspicion into proof. A clock-in is worth something before a court insofar as it leaves an objective, hard-to-falsify trail to check it against.

The detective’s evidence was admitted, but on procedural grounds

The town hall had hired a private detective who followed the worker between 19 April and 4 May. On appeal, the employee argued that this evidence was unlawful.

The TSJ does not delve into the proportionality of the surveillance. It rejects the argument on a more technical ground: the worker never challenged the evidence at the proper procedural stage—he neither lodged an objection (protesta) at trial nor raised its nullity through the channel of article 193(a) of the Labour Procedure Act (art. 193 a) LRJS)—and, above all, he had acknowledged the absences from the outset, merely attempting to justify them. One cannot acknowledge a fact and, at the same time, ask for the evidence that proves it to be struck down.

This is a nuance that matters for any company tempted to extrapolate from the case: the ruling is not a blank cheque for detective surveillance. The detective’s report here was just one more element, corroborated by the worker’s own admission and by the time records, not the star piece of evidence subjected to a lawfulness test that the court did not even have to resolve.

Why pleading illness did not help him

The worker tried to mitigate his responsibility by pleading a painful divorce, a psychiatric condition and an alcohol addiction, invoking the gradualist doctrine (teoría gradualista) so that the dismissal would be deemed disproportionate.

The court rejects this for lack of evidence: only the divorce proceedings in the preceding months were on record, and that, “beyond an understandable state of unease or distress”, does not amount to a mental illness affecting the voluntary nature of the conduct. The medical reports he submitted were dated after the disciplinary proceedings were opened. Without proving an actual impairment of his volitional capacity on the dates of the events, the gravity of the conduct remains intact, further aggravated by the fact that he was a manager with people under his charge.

The gradualist doctrine requires proportionality between the offence and the sanction, but that proportionality is assessed on proven facts. Here the facts were repeated, serious and acknowledged.

What this means for a company

The ruling confirms something that often goes overlooked: time tracking, beyond being an obligation toward the Labour Inspectorate, is a tool for internal control. But it only works as evidence if it is reliable and traceable; a record that depends on what the worker types in can be manipulated as easily as it is filled out.

The draft Royal Decree on time tracking insists on exactly that: entries that cannot be altered without leaving a trail, traceability of every change, reliable totalling. The very requirements that protect the worker are what allow the company to detect concealed absenteeism. In roles carrying managerial responsibility, where on-site supervision is lower, that traceability weighs even more heavily.

How a digital system fits in

With a digital clock-in like Cleverfy, every entry is recorded with its exact time and, if enabled, with location validation through geolocation. That does not completely eliminate trickery—no system does—but it does change the starting point: the trail left behind is objective, and corrections are logged with their author, exactly as the law requires.

In the case of this ruling, the town hall had to cross-reference two different systems and hire a detective to reconstruct what had happened weeks later. A reliable digital record shortens that path: the contradiction between what is declared and what is real surfaces in the data itself, with no forensic reconstructions.

See how Cleverfy works and find out how easy it is to have a time-tracking record that supports both the worker and the company.

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This ruling is not final and may be appealed in cassation for the unification of doctrine before the Supreme Court. Sources: STSJ Cataluña 4769/2026 (CENDOJ, ECLI:ES:TSJCAT:2026:4769).