As a unionized nurse, Mrs. 20SF has the benefit of receiving scheduled pay raises with each year of additional service. This is especially wonderful in years when inflation and wage increases are stagnant – she keeps moving forward while those that work for employers who aren’t under a union contract may be stuck in quicksand in the name of fiscal responsibility (enhancing their employers bottom line at the employees expense). But employer greed is a another story for another day.
Last year, while excitedly checking her first post-raise payroll statement, Mrs. 20SF was quickly deflated when she found that instead of seeing her hourly wage increase $1/hr., it actually decreased $0.15!
WTF (is what I said). What is a pay raise good for when… it’s a decrease?
Mrs. 20SF reached out to her payroll department with news of the error and they apologetically corrected the error, including back pay.
OK, OK. Payroll errors do happen, she caught it, it was corrected, no harm, no foul, let’s move on.
And then it happened AGAIN.
Identical repeat situation this year. Instead of +$1/hr., she found -$0.15 again.
OK, one time was an aberration, but 2 years in a row? This is something bigger and should be reported to the union, not just payroll. If it happened to her twice in 2 years, how many other among tens of thousands of unsuspecting employees (it’s a big hospital system) have had the same thing happen to them, but were unlucky enough to not check for or notice the error?
Separately, she has also occasionally noticed entire 12-hour shifts missing from her pay and had to submit for correction.
Mrs. 20SF is not alone. A few years ago, I had noticed that a massively incorrect deferred compensation payment from my employer that was missing many thousands of dollars. It was later corrected, but had I not seen the numbers on my paycheck, I would have never known.
Taking an even broader look, 82 million Americans (over half the workforce) have reported paycheck or payroll errors in their career!
And this brings me to the lesson I want to share with you all: often times, intentional or not, payroll gets it wrong (although they never seem to get it wrong in your favor, do they?).
We now live in a financially automatized society. We expect the software and algorithms to always get it right. They mostly do, but it’s easy to forget that imperfect humans still code the software and algorithms. And they do occasionally error and not catch it.
So do yourself a favor and diligently check each payroll statement to make sure that deposits, deductions, hours logged, pay rate, and raises are as they should be. To this day I still opt to receive paper payroll statements for that very reason, despite my company’s push to ween everyone off of them.
Don’t assume that you’ll always automatically be honestly paid for an honest days work. Seems overly simple and unlikely in this day and age, but it’s apparently not.
Have a payroll/pay raise/paycheck error story to share? Please add in the comments.
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Oh good grief! Excellent job catching those errors! That’s absolutely awful that there are such big errors on payroll. I’ve dealt with payroll errors, but it was actually where I was overpaid and I had to bring it to my employer’s attention. I guess I could have stayed silent about it, but I would want them to give me the same courtesy.
You are more honest than most!
Wow 82 million Americans with payroll errors? That’s not terribly comforting. Sometimes a correct paycheck is just something we just take for granted, especially when you work for a big company who’s supposed to have it all together. I’ll definitely have to watch our a little more carefully now.
Its definitely a good idea to double-check all financial records. I worked with a couple recently who hadn’t checked their social security records until I recommended it. Once they did they realized the wife’s earnings were under-reported! So she would have gotten less benefits than due to her if she had never bothered to check.. Little missed things like these can add up to huge losses over time..
I’ve also heard this is a good thing to check as well. Thanks for bringing it up.
Years ago I would notice overtime missing from my paystubs. We had a lazy old lady working in payroll. I then had to start printing out what timesheets I submitted and every 2 weeks would compare them to my paystubs to make sure I was getting what I was owed. The lady retired years ago, but I still do this habit. And yes I still catch errors (not in my favor).
“(although they never seem to get it wrong in your favor, do they?)”
Actually, before I went into the Navy I briefly worked a sales job with payroll rules I considered pretty bizarre. Anyways, though my commission numbers were legit (I checked), the base salary was paid double to me, two paychecks in a row. I told my boss and my company made me pay it back :( But, I don’t regret it, I did the right thing…still kind of wish they’d given me more than a smile and thank you e-mail for doing the right thing, like buy me lunch or something but alas, didn’t happen.
Also check other things like Paid Time Off! My company has a policy that service is considered “continuous” if you leave the company and return within a year. I left for 8 months, so my vacation time should have been referencing my original hire date in 2008. Instead, payroll had it as my return date in 2014. It would have cost me 11 vacation days if I had not caught it.
Like the original post, this “error” occurred and had to be corrected two separate times.
Yes! Vacation days is another good thing to keep an eye on.
Totally agree! I’m on a City payroll and while everyone around me opted to go paperless…..I am one of the few who receives paystubs regularly. It gives me a chance to check my overtime, vacation days etc.
I watch my paystub like a hawk. I even went thorough the trouble of creating an Excel sheet that I manually fill each pay period (only takes 30 seconds) but it gives me a nice overview of multiple years and allows me to catch accumulated gross and net pays errors.
Applause to hardworking payroll folks, though. I ended up in a similar situation to Mrs. 20sf. I only found out about it when I noticed a big jump in one of my checks. Called FINANCE guy at work who told me they forgot to adjust my pay after my last raise. I’d gotten married and adjusted my with holding so I didn’t notice it, he did.
I should have been on it and he should have made the adjustment earlier but I’m glad he did find it and fix it!
This happened to me last year. I work a side gig in addition to my full time job, and am paid by the hour. I keep meticulous track of each time I work and how much I should be paid based on the number of hours worked. Once I received all my paychecks for the previous month, I was reviewing my records, and something was not adding up. Turns out, they had forgotten to pay me for a night that I worked, and I was able to provide all of my records to prove that they had not paid. They were not too keen on paying me at first, but once they saw all the backup, they realized their error. Lesson learned, keep track of everything, otherwise someone else’s mistake could result in you not getting your hard earned cash.
Payroll theft is an evil that needs to uncovered whenever it happens. In this age of late capitalism, corporations try to get away with these shenanigans all the time!
This is a great illustration of why you need to be diligent with your finances. Everything from checking your bank and credit card statements to your paycheck as well it seems!
I’ve been self-employed for 12 years, so I don’t typically see mistakes in my payroll. ;)
But I agree with you – if this happened to you, how many other people is this happening to who don’t even notice? And I’m curious is this is a problem isolated to your employer, your industry (health care, where paychecks are ridiculously complicated and hard to decipher), or large corporations generally.
Payroll errors are terrible and so very rarely in the employees favor.
What’s worse is that a large majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck. So depending on the severity of the error, could cause cascading headaches that take months to resolve.
I’ve also noticed that most large employers don’t seem that in a hurry to rectify the situation either.
This is a great message.
Payroll errors can happen and it’s important to stay on top of your finances to resolve any problems that might occur.
Thanks for sharing this.
Devil’s advocate here!
I worked as a payroll coordinator for 10+ years. Last 5 doing payroll for 500 Ag seasonal employees in California. My recommendation is the same: DO check your payroll, often and thoroughly.
Mistakes usually have many causes: from ignorance of payroll laws, faulty algorithms, incompetent payroll clerks, or maybe even lack of communication between the departments. However in mid size to large corporations (where there is usually little to no direct communication between profit shareholders and payroll clerks) the mistakes are non-intentional. Managers between the shareholders and payroll clerks will have NO personal benefit in creating loopholes to cheat employees out of their earnings. Even if financial gain was involved, like in the case of profit-sharing bonuses to managers, the liability for getting caught for wrongly paying employees is huge. So, intentional payroll mistakes are very unlikely in most mid-size to large companies. However, Mom and Pop places are a different story! In my county, is very common for immigrants to work in small places without being paid overtime, split-shift, 7-day pay, overnight comp, or on-call comp.