The term “buddy punching” describes one employee using a scan card or a code to punch into an attendance system on the behalf of a tardy or absent employee. The scam allows delinquent employees to go unpunished and repeat their offense, and it costs the business money in unused labor costs.

For the past four years, 85 Venezuelan McDonald’s restaurants have used California-based Ingersoll Rand Recognition Systems’s HandPunch technology to eliminate buddy punching and the associated costs.

Students make up 90 percent of employees at the Venezuelan McDonald’s. The restaurants found that many were covering for fellow employees during busy times of the school year—exam season, for example. “McDonald’s moved to biometrics because they wanted to verify that the employee clocking in was really that person,” said Jose Ramon Casal of Caracas-based Electronica Quantum, the company that installed the systems, in a press release.

“Most supervisors at McDonald’s are promoted from within and many find it difficult to impose rules and restrictions on their fellow workers,” said Casal in the same release. “The HandPunch ensures that everyone is treated the same and fairly. McDonald’s employees are satisfied with the HandPunches because their payroll information is processed quickly and without mistakes. They receive regular reports with information about their time and attendance.”

With the HandPunch, employees sign in for work using their hand as their identification badge. The unit takes three, three-dimensional biometric images of employees’ hands and stores the information. When employees clock in, the systems ask for a two- to ten-digit personal identification number that was assigned when employees enroll in the HandPunch terminal. When this number is combined with a hand scan, there is only a very small chance that an employee can sign in for someone else. The false acceptance rate for the HandPunch, or the rate at which the machine will accept the wrong hand, is 1 out of 1000. Each HandPunch can store information for up to 30,000 employees.