A woman shared her company reimbursement problem in a recent Reddit post. She revealed that she had received an extra $3,000 on top of her regular salary, which the company later withdrew without notice. The company pulled additional fifty-five hundred dollar deposit making her account go in negative. The post shared under r/legal received 702 comments.
She started her post by writing that last Friday her company had accidentally deposited an extra three thousand dollars into her checking account alongside her regular $2,500 paycheck. On noticing the error, the woman sent a written email to her company HR manager and payroll department pointing out the mistake.
The Reddit user wrote that she asked for the proper procedure to return the three thousand dollars in her email. Concluding her post she questioned, “Can an employer legally pull more money than they overpaid and refuse to fix the negative balance immediately?”
In response to her email, she received an automated reply saying the payroll department was out of the office. “Thursday night, I logged into my bank app and saw that my checking account was negative thirty-two hundred dollars,” she wrote.
Later in her post, she said that instead of pulling back the three-thousand-dollar overpayment, her company payroll department initiated two separate reverse wires. “They pulled the original fifty-five hundred dollar deposit and then another three thousand dollars on top of it,” she wrote.
The Reddit user explained that the company completely drained her personal savings and triggered five overdraft fees and bounced her automatic mortgage payment. When she called her HR director, she was told the company's direct deposit agreement gave it full authority to reverse erroneous transactions at its discretion.
They also told the user that the company would reissue her actual paycheck on the next scheduled cycle in two weeks.
“My bank is telling me this was an authorized ACH reversal from my employer, while my employer is acting like leaving an employee with negative three thousand dollars for two weeks is just an administrative inconvenience,” she wrote. “I should have never signed up for direct deposit with this place.”
Concluding her post she questioned, “Can an employer legally pull more money than they overpaid and refuse to fix the negative balance immediately?”
One commenter wrote, “If they can pull the overpayment on an offcycle, no reason they can’t process offcycle wages/refund one of the overpayments. And I’d document the overdraft fees and email my boss and HR director asking for them to make you whole for their mistake.”
Another commenter wrote, “Just be calm and talk to them. Work with your manager and HR. If that goes nowhere cc legal. Mistakes happen. People don't always realize how big of a mistake they have made due to being in their own bubble. This is actually quite illegal and will get them in a lot of trouble if they screw it up. DO NOT LEAD WITH THIS. Be calm, document everything. If God forbid it gets to the legal stage, it will probably get solved very quickly. If not, California has a lot of orgs that help/oversee this.”
The Daily Dot was unable to independently verify the events described in this post. The details above reflect the account shared on r/legal. This article does not constitute legal advice. Readers facing similar situations should consult a licensed attorney or their state's labor board.
