In Corbin v. Time Warner Entertainment-Advance/Newhouse Partnership, a former employee sued his employer for lost compensation. The 9th Circuit upheld the lower court’s grant of summary judgment for the employer, holding that the employer’s policy of rounding employee time stamps to the nearest quarter-hour did not deprive Plaintiff of overtime compensation when the policy did not violate the federal rounding regulation, 29 C.F.R. Section 785.48(b), and Plaintiff’s claim that he was not compensated for one minute was properly classified as de minimis.

The Court held that the employer’s rounding policy was neutral both facially, and as applied to Plaintiff, because the employer rounded employee time stamps to the nearest quarter-hour regardless of whether it benefitted the employer or the employees. In other words, for any given pay period, an employee may gain minutes and compensation, or they may lose minutes and compensation. The Court rejected Plaintiff’s contention that every employee must gain time or break even for every pay period because a system that rounds time stamps both upward and downward will average out in the long-term. In practice, the Court’s holding suggests that plaintiffs may have a hard time challenging rounding procedures, which are generally favored by the courts as a way to efficiently and neutrally calculate employee compensation.

As for Plaintiff’s contention that he was not properly compensated for the one minute he accidentally logged onto an auxiliary program prior to clocking in, the Court agreed with the district court’s classification of that time as de minimis because recording such a small amount of time would be difficult for employers in practice and the accidental opening of an auxiliary computer program was not a regular occurrence.

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