Payroll

Settling the case was easy, until the IRS got involved

08/25/2009

A federal district court in New Jersey recently approved a settlement in an employment discrimination case where an employee received both front pay and back pay. Hashing out the settlement figure, however, was the easy part. Both sides were confused about how to treat the pay for tax purposes. Do IRS regulations consider both front pay and back pay to be wages?

Lilly and Carlos: Questions and answers on the Ledbetter Act’s unintended consequences

08/04/2009

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was designed to ensure pay equity for women. It does a whole lot more than that! Learn how this landmark legislation affects all protected employee classes and could influence your employee benefits program.

Can a former employee demand that we pay her for unused vacation and sick leave?

07/27/2009

Q. A former employee is demanding pay for her unused vacation and sick leave. Must we pay her?

Turn to legal or immigration experts when facing wage-and-hour complexities

07/24/2009

If you employ seasonal labor, import employees from other countries and make payroll deductions for their equipment and transportation, you may want to hire an expert in visas and seasonal labor. That’s what saved one employer from double damages and an extra year of liability.

Company Records: What to Keep, What to Dump

07/21/2009

A records retention schedule ensures that an organization keeps the records it needs for operational, legal, fiscal or historical reasons, and then destroys them when they’re no longer useful. You have to know what you have and how long to keep it—legally and for your own business purposes—before you can establish an efficient records management system.

Can we deduct from his paycheck? Employee ruined a company-issued laptop

07/20/2009

Q. One of our employees was issued a company laptop and later corrupted it by downloading games and other nonbusiness software. Can we recover the value of the damaged property from this employee’s next paycheck?

Reducing salaries and hours: How to document?

07/17/2009

Q. We’ve reduced the salaries of our exempt employees and told them to work only 36 hours each week. Still, however, many of those employees continue to work 40 or more hours per week. Exempt employees feel uncomfortable documenting 36 hours, when, in actuality, they’ve worked many more hours than that. Should we ask exempt employees to document hours that are not necessarily true?

Just-departed worker owes us money: Can we dock (or withhold) his final paycheck?

07/08/2009

Q. One of my employees who recently quit has failed to pay back a personal charge he made on our corporate credit card. Can I simply deduct the amount of the charge from his last paycheck or withhold his final paycheck until he pays for the charge?

As the Wurld turns: Upstate firm owes $1.2M to 19 workers

07/06/2009

An arbitrator has awarded $1.2 million in back pay and damages to 19 former employees of Wurld Media, Inc. The Saratoga Springs-based Internet startup, which marketed a product similar to iTunes, began having trouble making payroll in 2006.

Beware incentive plans that deduct pay from exempt employees

06/05/2009

The FLSA sets strict rules for who can be classified as an exempt employee not entitled to overtime pay. One of those is the so-called salary-basis test. Exempt employees must be paid the same salary regardless of the quality or quantity of their work in any given pay period. In other words, employers can’t make deductions from pay for poor work.