Texts, Private Pay, and a Signature
You have worked as an ABAT with 10-year-old Eli for five months at a clinic. Eli's mother texts your personal phone to ask whether you can babysit Saturday night, and offers to pay you $25 an hour directly for two extra "practice sessions" at home that the funding source does not cover. The same week, a coworker asks you to initial her data sheets for Tuesday's 4:00 session because she left early; she says the BCBA "never checks" and the family needs the hours. Separately, your BCBA tells you she is assigning you to train a new technician next week, and you have had no training in supervision.
1. Address the mother's two requests.
Read the worked answer
Decline both, warmly and briefly, and route them correctly.
- Babysitting creates a dual relationship. You would be a paid caregiver and a behavior technician for the same family, with no clinical oversight of the caregiving role. It blurs boundaries, complicates any future disagreement, and may breach the funding source's rules.
- Private sessions are the more serious problem. Delivering behavior-analytic services for direct pay, outside the service authorization, without a supervising BCBA, and under a credential that does not license independent practice, is practicing outside your scope. It also removes the client from the data and supervision system the plan depends on, and takes the family's money for something the BCBA never approved.
What to do: respond on approved channels rather than your personal phone, say you cannot do either, and say who can. Pass the request to the BCBA as a question about whether additional authorized hours or caregiver training are warranted. Document the request and your response. Keep clinical communication in the record, not on your personal device.
2. The coworker's request.
Read the worked answer
Refuse. Initialing a data sheet for a session that did not occur is falsification of clinical records, and if the hours are billed it is fraud against the funding source. The "nobody checks" argument is irrelevant - detection is not the standard.
The concrete harms: the family's authorized hours are consumed for a service not delivered, the BCBA's graph contains fabricated data and will drive treatment decisions, and you would be the author of the falsified record.
What to do: state clearly and without a lecture that you cannot sign for a session you did not observe. Do not sign. Report the request through the chain of command - to your BCBA or clinical director - the same day, and document it. If you later see the sheets initialed by someone else or the hours submitted, report that too. Failing to report is itself a conduct problem, and "I just didn't want to get her in trouble" is not a defense.
3. The supervision assignment.
Read the worked answer
You can support onboarding, but you cannot take on the responsibilities of a qualified supervisor.
Before agreeing, clarify in writing: exactly which skills you are authorized to train, what training protocol or fidelity checklist you should use, who assesses the new technician's competence, and who signs off. Ask for the BCBA to observe and verify competency rather than relying on your report. If any part of the assignment amounts to clinical supervision or to making treatment decisions, say that it exceeds your role and ask for it to be reassigned or directly overseen.
Agreeing vaguely is the trap. "Train the new tech" without a defined scope leaves you accountable for competency decisions you are not credentialed to make, and leaves the new technician unsupervised in the way the regulations mean. Document what was asked, what you agreed to, and what the BCBA retained.