I would fire her. She knew it was a mistake and wasn't honest about it. Your company sounds like a peach

She didn't know. She only found out when they brought it to her attention two years later.

So what I'd try to settle for is the following:
a) Obviously cut the pay to the proper amount immediately.
b) Agree to recover 80% of the overpaid amount over 40 weeks, starting 12 weeks from now so she has time to adjust her finances.
c) Let her keep the other 20% - so essentially an extra 3 weeks pay - as a goodwill gesture

I’d give her three choices:

Dock her wages.
Have her work Fridays but not get paid for two years.
Fire her.

I think there are somethings in life you have to suck up. Being an employer myself, if she is a good worker, you just suck it up. Just make the correction going forward. I would make a couple other changes, but that would be my personal preference.

If you suck it up, you have to make an example of somebody else who should have verified the change. Unless you're the one in charge of that in which case it's time to eat at least some of it.

Presumably she was working Fridays before then and made $X a paycheck. She requests unpaid leave every friday. She still makes $X a paycheck. I find that hard to believe. Maybe for the first few paychecks she wasn't checking, but she pays taxes, one would assume. So I would find she is at least partially guilty due to the preponderance of evidence.

I think you'd be surprised how many people don't actually check their paychecks. My wife has run into similar stuff with fucked up payroll, sometimes when the employee had been shorted for a long time without knowing it.

There's an employee who requested every Friday off in writing so she could attend church activities that day instead. She understands this would be unpaid leave. Her supervisor approved in writing but never apparently told payroll of this arrangement. Two years passed. She got paid for those Fridays and didn't notice and the company didn't either.

Now they notice and asked her to pay them back. She said hell no I already told you I'm out on Fridays and it ain't my fault you didn't tell payroll. The company isn't sure if they should fire her or not. She's an otherwise honest and high performing employee. What say you all?

yea, if she doesn't pay it back it's called stealing. Doesn't matter if she claims to have not known, she should've known based on the size of her weekly checks.

Reminds me of something that happened many many years ago. Girl I knew at UW Madison went to ATM and the ATM fucked up and her balance read $600,000 instead of $600. She didn't tell the bank and just kept the money. Bank found out a few months later and she had to pay it back WITH INTEREST.


TL;DR: You can' t play ignorant in regards to what's in your bank account no matter how it got there.

How did that work? Did she remove the money?

That reminds me of a time when I received tax refunds for a company that had the same name as mine but was incorporated in a different state. A check came for $126,000. Then a week later another check came for $181,000. I told me accountant and he advised me to deposit them. He said, "If they catch you, all they'll do is make you pay it back." I said I absolutely was not going to deposit the checks. Instead I framed them and hung them on the wall. About a year later I got a call from the IRS looking for the money. I told the guy I didn't know what he was talking about.

Who attends church in Friday? Sounds like she was running some kind of scam. Every Friday off. Fuck you.

The Muslim equivalent of the day of the Sabbath is on Fridays from 12pm-2pm normal time and 1pm-3pm daylight savings time. There's a YUGE turnout for these services.

Oh. Interesting. Vegan is she a Muslim?