My wife and I work for a small business, 23 employees. The owner can't really afford to pay us a competitive wage in out field, but we are regularly growing and he makes it up to us in perks such as quite a bit of vacation, very flexible hours, yearly bonuses and our retirement fund.
We place percentage of our wages into an ira and will match up to 10%. After 10%, he'll contribute half.
Turns out our accountant (who is terrible but we are stuck with her because the owner is really good friends of the family) has only been matching 2% for the last 18 months.
My wife, the general manager, only found out because she requested financial data to double the books. The accountant refused to hand them over for 2 months and she only got them by going to her office and refusing to leave until she handed them over. But that's a different story.
When my wife told the owner, he told her not to tell anyone until he figured out what to do, by she told me. What the owner is planning to do is pay the entire missing amounts to all the accounts at the end of the year.
Two problems arise from this. We miss out any any growth. But the real kicker is that he is paying for it out of the "overflow" account. That is where a section of the business profits go that all go towards the bonuses, and it won't cover the whole cost. The owner is paying the rest out of pocket and will be reimbursed later. So now no bonuses from us.
We checked the contract and the bonuses and not an amount, but a percentage based on performance and work rolls, so nothing we can do about that.
So we lose our bonuses, miss out on any growth, and I'm not allowed to tell any of the other employees about it.
I'm not sure how to proceed from here. The only person above me is the owner, if I tell the owner then he'll know my wife told me, and I don't know how he'll react. The IRA contributions are written into our contract so he has to make those.
Any advice would be appreciated.
TLDR: out accountant screwed up and hasn't been adding enough money to our retirement account and is using our bonus money to pay it back.
Submitted September 17, 2017 at 04:00PM by ilpadrino113 http://ift.tt/2wnuTYj
