LAKEWOOD, Wash. — One Pierce College employee was fired and another is under review after a state whistleblower investigation found they were surfing the web too much at work.
Choi Halladay, Pierce College’s Vice President of Administrative Services, said it constitutes a misuse of state resources, both in use of their computers and in the waste of employee time.
“It is an enormous amount of time spent on non-work-related activities,” he said.
Halladay said Antoinette Bates’ co-workers in the admissions office turned her in, and the college reported the situation to the state auditor’s office.
Investigators sampled 47 days between October 23rd, 2013, and March 11th, 2014. They found 40 days when non-work-related web browsing occurred, tallying 4,500 minutes in all — an average of nearly two hours a day on those days.
Halladay said Bates was on Facebook, Amazon, and even browsing dating sites as well as streaming music from Internet radio, searching for religious-based youth treatment centers, and searching personal travel-related topics such as cruises, airline flights, and hotels.
She was fired in May, something students like Matthews Williams say is going too far.
“I don't think she did that big of a thing, certainly not to lose an income about,” he said. Bates told KIRO 7 in a brief phone call that the situation is humiliating but she declined an on-camera interview.
The investigation found another employee, Nora Dudley, spent excessive time online too, shopping, viewing videos and surfing social networking and dating sites, among others.
She's under review for possible disciplinary action.
“I’m sure there's a million things people here could be doing with more priority than that,” student Kaylei Kovacs said of the internet time.
KIRO 7 asked Halladay, “For someone who looks at this and says, ‘I surf the web at work sometimes- you're overreacting,’ how do you respond?”
“There is a difference between surfing the web on an occasional basis and spending the majority of your time doing that,” Halladay said.
Pierce College officials are requiring all employees to go through a new ethics class as a reminder of what’s appropriate at work.
They are also requiring all new hires to immediately go through the class as part of training.
KIRO
