What is Proxy attendance?

Definition

Proxy attendance is one person marking another present. It is the specific loss that identity verification exists to prevent, and it is invisible in any system that records only a time and a place.

How it works

Proxy attendance is expensive because it is systematic rather than occasional: it usually reflects an arrangement between colleagues rather than a one-off. It also corrupts the attendance record that payroll and every compliance report depend on, so the cost is not only the wages paid for absent hours.

What it means in India

It is the reason the face-recognition attendance category exists in India and is sold hardest to contract workforces at fixed sites, where high churn and a shared entrance make it easiest. For a small mobile team, a location plus a selfie at check-in raises the cost of cheating considerably without hardware, though it is a weaker control than a supervised terminal.

What people get wrong

• Treating a register signature as verification. A signature verifies nothing about who wrote it.
• Buying the strongest identity control for a workforce whose actual problem is location, or the reverse.

Terms this one depends on

More on attendance and shifts

Where this shows up in practice

Almost everything on this page ends up as a line on a payslip or a figure in a register. Shiftelio keeps attendance, leave, salary structure and the statutory deductions in one place, so the number in the letter and the number in the payslip come from the same record.