Not sure if this belongs on /r/personalfinance, and I apologize if it's long winded. TL;DR at the bottom.
It seems like every employer has a different method when paying their employees. The way my company worked is we get paid twice a month, the 1st and the 15th. Not too unusual, but they had a funny method of paying us. If you add up 40 hours per week times 52 weeks for a year, you’ll end up with 2,080 hours. We got paid 24 times a year (twice a month), so our company paid us the same hours every paycheck (2,080 hours / 24 pay periods = 86.67 hours per paycheck), and the company will add/deduct in later paychecks for overtime or missed time.
The problem is, the 86.67-hour paycheck is the basis for every single paycheck. 2016 was a leap year, so there must have been an extra day in there, right? I always assumed the company paid any extra days on the last pay check of the year. The pay was always different anyways. The taxes were calculated different, and we were able to sell back any unused vacation time, and that will show up on our last check. So the last paycheck was usually a bloated.
A co-worker friend and I decided to do some digging. 2,080 hours comes out to 260 working days. It turns out that 2014, 2015, and 2016 each had 261 working days. My friend and I check all of our paystubs from the last 3 years (they’re all on the payroll website), and it turns out we got paid for 260 days for 2014, 2015, and 2016. We were short one day for the past 3 years, and it turns out 2012 and 2013 also had 261 working days (but we couldn’t confirm if we were paid for those extra days in those years because our paystubs only went so far back).
I originally was going to take this information to the person who runs the payroll at my company. Even though she’s a nice lady, she is wishy-washy and can brush things aside. I wanted to make sure this was an issue that would be seen. My friend and I wanted to remain anonymous, so I posted our results to the anonymous company forum. These can be seen by the entire company, even the executives.
Well it turns out this DID catch their attention right away. The payroll lady and her boss went into a bit of a freak-out mode. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but let’s just say that they found out that the anonymous forum is really anonymous.
A week later, HR and Payroll had a meeting with all affected employees (about 35 hourly employees). The payroll lady explained this is how they have been doing payroll since she’s been at the company (almost 40 years), and never realized the mistake. They told us that they spoke with their lawyers about this issue, and it turns out they legally only have to pay back for any missing days within the past 2 years. They decided to own up to their mistake; they paid us for the past 5 years of missed time (one day for each year), and on top of that, they doubled the amount as an apology for this long overlooked mistake.
Since I’ve been with the company long enough, I got the full 10 days of extra pay, some people only got 2-8 days. It was still nice of them to pay us back a lot more than they were legally obligated to. I do kind of wish I didn’t go anonymous, so I can take all the credit, but honestly the most I would have gotten out of it would be a free lunch and a pat on the back.
TL;DR – Employer was shorting us about 1 day pay for the past 40+ years, spotted the error and company paid affected employees back 10 days worth of pay.
Submitted August 22, 2017 at 02:25PM by OrangeKefka http://ift.tt/2xpOBij
