Reviews and Retro Pay

Rockie

I am trying to find a legal precedent on this (and I know there must be one). Reviews on our employees continually are done late by supervisors and, consequently, we pay employees pay retro to the date they were supposed to get
their increase.

Previously, payroll would tax the retro at a different rate (if an employee requested this) or cut them a separate check for the retro pay. Our payroll is now under supervision of the controller (aptly named) who has arbitrarily decided she will no longer "allow this".

Not having supervised payroll (thank God!), is this something that can be denied if the employee requests it? I feel from an employee relations standpoint, the least we can do is give the employee the "back pay" any legal way they request it since it is the supervisor's fault if reviews are not completed in a timely fashion.

By the way, we are rapidly moving towards everyone doing reviews on an annual basis and doing way with this anniversary month review nightmare.

Thanks for your assistance!

Gillian

I don't think that you will find a precedent, but I hope that you do. You are probably lucky because there are lots of employers who don't pay retro pay at all - thereby doing what I think is among the top 5 of things to do to make employees upset. If you aren't successful in getting Ms. Moneybags to understand about the consideration of the human impact of the decisions that she makes, so the only thing that will change it is somewhere a manager will get upset because a higher level manager was tardy. Maybe complaints from higher level employees will make her reverse her decision. Should you forget to send her review to her boss in a timely fashion so that she suffers? Nah, but an evil thought on a Friday afternoon.

System

Unless it's in a union contract, you don't have a legal obligation to give raises. So if you give them, I'd think that you can give them in any manner your company (or the controller) wants to.

Methinks too many people are going to too much trouble to protect the supervisors from the consequences of their apathy. Nothing will change until they catch hell from someone -- either their boss or angry employees.

James Sokolowski
Senior Editor
M. Lee Smith Publishers