Chalk the Department of Labor’s most recent technological investment up to an “epic fail.”
The DOL spent taxpayer money to develop an iPhone application, DOL-Timesheet, in an attempt to help workers keep track of their hours worked so they don’t miss out on any pay. The problem with that, though, is, as Americans for Limited Government’s Nathan Mehrens points out in Monday’s Washington Examiner, that the new gizmo gives out bad legal advice, and can short workers up to 65 hours of lost time per year.
When the DOL released the app a couple weeks ago on May 9, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was “pleased” that the DOL was “able to leverage increasingly popular and available technology to ensure that workers receive the wages to which they are entitled.”
“This app will help empower workers to understand and stand up for their rights when employers have denied their hard-earned pay,” Solis said.
Now, though, Solis’s DOL, through the faulty iPhone app, denies workers “their hard-earned pay.” To make matters worse for the Labor Department after their technological dysfunction, The Daily Caller has learned ALG just hit them with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to try to get information on costs and development from them. To this point, DOL has not publicly stated how many taxpayer dollars it wasted on the iPhone app, nor has it provided any information on how it went about making it.
“The Department of Labor needs to demand the taxpayers money back that could in fact get the users prosecuted by the Department of Labor,” ALG spokesman Rick Manning told TheDC.
The DOL did not respond to TheDC’s request for comment.