Workshop Helps Understanding of Overpayments

Attendees learned the ins and outs of wage overpayments from two top payroll leaders with Wednesday morning’s Congress workshop, “Overpayments: What Can We Do?”

“You can never have too many seminars on how to handle the complex business of rectifying salary under and overpayments,” attendee Temi Goldstein of Platinum HRM in Brooklyn said. A couple of truths, she noted from the seminar is that it’s best to catch a mistake quickly and it is much easier to fix an underpayment than an overpayment, from the employer’s perspective.

One payroll professional in the seminar took a $2 million hit from an underpayment.

Barbara Youngman (pictured above), CPP, Senior Payroll Analyst for Toyota, and LaTisha O’Neal, CPP, Payroll Supervisor for Bama Companies, Inc., answered these questions and more during the workshop.

“For those who have not had to deal with an overpayment, I think they will be surprised at how complicated and time-consuming overpayments really are and that it is not as easy as just deducting the amount due from the next check,” Youngman said. “For the more tenured professionals, it will introduce multi-state wage and hour compliance into the equation and be a good refresher to validate their current processes.”

Added Paula Meyers, CFP, at White Lodging, a management company for hotels: “Payroll mistakes can do more than annoy an employee or drum up extra paperwork, it also can be a major hit to a company’s bottom line, impacting profits and losses,"

After Youngman explained the regulatory environment, O’Neal discussed how to put a plan into place for dealing with overpayments, including how to file amended tax returns.

“This is an area where we see a wide variety of situations,” O’Neal said. “It is my goal that attendees leave with a better understanding of the process of overpayments, so they have tools to succeed.”

Payroll professional Goldstein said she is constantly brushing up on how to handle various issues that pop up in her job. She said she was happy to see that the seminar reinforced how she has been handling those issues.

Additional reporting by Teresa Burney.