Ghost Employee

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by BetaTesterZERO

I want to make a character that acts as a ghost employee, in other words, although it has a job that requires your time and effort it just does not and still drawing his salary as if you were at work (doing it by fraud).

How does it work? It would be a case of "Secret"?

Unless it was an obsolete specialty that the organization kept on the rolls to coast people into retirement or to dump useless relations of the boss or whatever, and the boss already knows about it.

Of course then it would still be a secret, just only from those outside the organization. As it is not criminal fraud it would not be subject to penalty except embarrassment so the secret would be a low level.

Alternatively, in an intelligence organization, the job could be a front, the way ImpSec Courier was for Miles Vorkosigan. That would be a very high secret; assassinations would be committed to preserve or discover it should they be needed.

[Miuramir]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Alternatively, in an intelligence organization, the job could be a front...

In my (fairly historical) Steampunk campaign, one of the PCs started out officially as the Assistant Librarian for a posh London club with a strong literary bent. She's been promoted to "Book Buyer", at a substantial increase in salary... plus removal of her expected hours on the clock and most of her explicit duties, because as far as the secret organization that uses the club as a front is concerned, her services as an adventurer-on-call are a whole lot more useful to them than dusting and shelving.

So, officially, she draws a nice salary with minimal requirements (an hour or so a week, plus a part-day or so monthly, mostly at her discretion). Unofficially, she's expected to be using her free time to be preparing for, going on, and recovering from assorted adventures (largely the competitive acquisition of mystical tomes for the secret library); but the facade gives her and the club a certain veneer of respectability and plausible deniability. In period, it's easy enough to hint that her father (a respected member of the club, now largely retired) arranged for the position as a nepotistic sinecure.