Worker's Job Notifies Staff They Will Withhold $200 Per Paycheck For The Rest Of The Year Because They Overpaid Them For Months Without Noticing
Expecting them to not take the money back may be unrealistic, but there's a better way to handle a situation like this.
Voronaman | Shutterstock.com Mistakes are always going to happen at work, and sometimes, they're going to be ones that directly impact workers in negative ways. However, a skillful management team can navigate these waters in a way that is at least sensitive to their staff's situation.
Such is not the case for a worker on Reddit whose employer recently discovered a major payroll issue. The way they've chosen to handle it is basically passing the buck, making their mistake the workers' problem.
The company announced it would withhold $200 per paycheck for the rest of the year because it overpaid the staff for months.
Right off the bat, this seems completely out of line. Unless you're making a substantially large salary, $200 is a LOT of money to lose twice a month, every month, for months on end.
But even more infuriating is the fact that for this worker, this is the second time in six months that management has made a major payroll error. "Six months ago, we got an email saying we had been paid incorrectly… but that we had been underpaid," they wrote in their Reddit post. "Now they’re telling us we were overpaid this time."
And to add even more insult to injury, the company is placing the blame squarely where it absolutely does not belong and taking no ownership over the situation.
The company blamed the errors on their payroll software and is now making staff foot the bill.
Now to be fair, expecting any company to just let employees keep thousands of misallocated dollars is unrealistic. Should they? Probably! Why should employees have to pay for employers' mistakes? But this is America, where the rules are nearly always stacked against workers. For now, that's just the way it is.
But a company can still handle it ethically and kindly — the exact opposite of what this one did. In a company-wide email, they explained that "recently we learned of an issue with our payroll system that unfortunately impacts you and several other employees."
Reddit
They went on to explain that weekend and overnight pay was "incorrectly set up" by their payroll services provider. "As a result, you were overpaid on several paychecks beginning in May and continuing into August."
There are a couple of problems here. First of all, the payroll software is just software — it only does what it's told to do. Nobody at the payroll software company is handling the company's actual payroll anymore than Microsoft is entering the data into your Excel spreadsheets. That's not how anything works.
More importantly, this went on for THREE MONTHS with nobody noticing. There are layers upon layers of managerial mess-ups here being blamed on a software program. It's ludicrous on its face, and also demoralizing to employees — it basically assumes they're too dim-witted to catch this nonsense.
The worker was infuriated and many urged them to report the company to labor authorities.
"Although we wish you could keep the overpayment, the total of all the overages is more than $41k and is more than [the company] can afford," the email went on to say, "and it simply wouldn't be fair to those who were correctly paid."
Reddit
This is as dishonest as it is patronizing, as is the way they decided to rectify it, acting as if they're doing the staff a huge favor by not deducting the money all at once and spreading it out instead.
And at no point does the company seem aware that having $200 deducted every two weeks is a life-disrupting crisis for many, many people. Is this company so strapped that it couldn't spread the payback out over more time to lessen the blow?
The worker themself was furious. "After they all sat on vacation all summer and we worked our [tails] off in our caregiving positions… It's [expletive] condescending. I wanna scream."
Commenters were in total agreement. "I love how they blamed [the payroll services provider]," one commenter wrote. "At least take some responsibility." The worker agreed, saying that it felt like the company was "gaslighting" employees.
Others urged the worker to file a complaint with state and federal labor boards since this has been a recurring issue with payroll. Federal law entitles employers to recoup any overpayments to employees regardless of the circumstances, but it's still not a bad idea.
What's crystal clear is that the management team in charge of payroll does not have its act together. They're perfectly willing to pass that wild inconvenience onto their employees, so workers might as well cause a hassle for them with the Department of Labor. Maybe then they'll actually have an incentive to do their job correctly.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.