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Our company has a wellness contest to promote healthy lifestyle and well being. The contest is focused around how much physical activity you perform. (For example, 1 mile run = 10 points). The top 3 individuals with the most points at the end of the contest get a nice cash prize. 1st place gets a whopping $3000.

The person who organized this contest has left the company, and I was put in charge.

While this contest has good intentions, the way it was setup is beyond stupid. Essentially, you can put whatever you want in the system, and there's no way to verify or check if you're uploading accurate information. I could put that I climbed Mt Everest today, but don't need to provide any proof, and I'll instantly shoot to the top of the leaderboard.

Because this is a huge cash prize, people are getting really into it. Tempers are flaring now as some people are (understandably) claiming that other individuals are cheating. Some examples are:

• A very obese man (he says he is 415 lbs) has claimed to run a marathon with a pace of 5:18 a mile.


• An individual who worked an 8 hour day on Monday claimed to have run for 16 hours on that same day (and then repeated this feat on Tuesday and Thursday of the same week).


• A woman who is probably 5'0" and thin as a rail (I'm guessing no more than 100 lbs) claimed to have bench pressed 360 lbs.


• A man in his early 70s claimed to have finished 2 Ironman Triatholons in a 3 day period

Now, I'm no fitness buff and I suppose that all of these are conceivably possible. But people are crying BS on these results and I tend to agree with them. Given the large cash prize, things are getting really heated. I really don't want to deal with this, but unfortunately I have to because I've been put in charge.

Is it better to just award these individuals with far-fetched data and deal with everybody else getting mad at me? Or is it better to confront these individuals or disqualify them for clearly cheating? How can I approach this situation professionally?

You shouldn't kick anyone out of the program without running it past your supervisor or HR first.

That said, if there are people cheating that blatantly there are probably more cheating by claiming plausible levels of activity while sitting on the couch all day. As broken as it's become, my recommendation would be to try and shut it down completely or to award the prize randomly among all participants.

Obviously not everyone is taking the contest seriously because it is so open to abuse.

Hell if I was the obese guy and you had a "one size fits all" program why would I take it seriously? At 415 pounds I'm probably not going to run a marathon so how can I compete with the guy who can? At 5 foot and 100 pounds she probably isn't going to benchpress as much as someone else.

Sounds like the program/competition is a joke and people are treating it that way. The best solution would be to try to shut down the program - perhaps use the planned prize money for other related things (subsidised membership at a local gym or similar)