My company started hiring office assistants a couple years ago. The rationale is pretty straightforward: since good engineers are hard to find, free our engineers of non-engineering tasks so they can spend more time on engineering.
Most of the part-time office assistants do customer support or sales processing, but one of the office assistant positions is special: the person hired for that position does most of the purchasing and many other miscellaneous tasks that several of the full-time employees (including myself) used to do. The person in this position has everyone's corporate credit cards (which I suspect is a violation of the credit card terms, but I'd have to check on that) and various online accounts (again, possible violations of the TOS, especially for purchasing- or banking-related sites). Now I'm being asked to transfer administrative access to that person for other accounts. So far, I haven't explicitly been asked to transfer management of the employee benefits to the assistant, but I suspect I may be asked to do so at the next renewal.
The concern I have is that someone with administrative access could remove everyone else's administrative access, change the contact information, and lock us out of our accounts. If the person also eventually manages the employee benefits, they could cancel employees' benefits. I trust the current office assistant not to do any of this, but I'm concerned that a future person hired for this position might do so, especially if we continue to grow. (What if a con artist passes our interview process?)
How much power do you give your part-time employees over the administration of your company? Are my concerns reasonable, or am I just being paranoid?
