Tonight I discovered something that has me in a bit of a quandary but I know that because I am a moral person I'll do "the right thing."
Last week I reviewed my paycheck and noticed it was off from my estimate. I glanced at the allocation of hours worked on the stub and there was a block of over 10 hours attributed to my standard rate which is paid only if I work hours outside of my regular overnite hours since those get a differential. I knew I had attended a couple of mid-afternoon meetings that payperiod but not ten hours worth...should only have been a couple of hours. My assumption was that the finance director had made an error and paid my regular rate instead of the differential rate for some of my overnite hours. Determined to point out this error and get my pay corrected I asked for a tally of the hours worked in the payperiod. (This tally used to be printed right on the stub but for some reason it isn't anymore as of a couple payperiods ago.)
But when I computed the hours according to the tally, I found the error. I had actually been overpaid.
During one of the afternoon meetings, the building experienced a brownout and when the meeting adjourned, none of us hourly employees who were not regularly scheduled for that time were able to clock out. So the timeclock still had me on and, for some reason, hadn't clocked me "out" when I clocked "in" at 11pm later that day. So I got paid for about 7.5 hours I hadn't worked.
Now we have a system for exceptions to the time clock punches in the form of a, well, form, that we write on to indicate such things and I did indicate my correct clock out time at the end of the afternoon meeting on it. But it musn't have been reviewed, lest the time clock accounting of my hours would have been adjusted. What's more is the likelyhood that this error affected at least 2 other staff who attended the meeting, thus overpaying them as well.
So here's the dilemma in a nutshell.
When I tell Christine, the Finance Director, about this not only will I be looking at reimbursing the company for the overpaid hours, but since it put me in overtime for that payperiod by an additional 7.5 hours, the OT would have to be included in the equation as well. Altogether we're talking over $150. Ouch!
But it could expose 2 other staff to the same debt of repayment if they too got overpaid.
And it would put egg on the face of our new Financial Director as she'd have to fess up to her mistake to the CEO.
But, in order to protect herself, Christine might lie and say that the exception report form hadn't indicated the inability to clock out thus putting blame on me (and the other staff) making it look like we committed time clock fraud and this could get me (and my co-workers) fired.
Oh my.
Makes me wonder if it'd be better to just forget all about this and ignore it altogether.
Hmmm.
WWRDD? (What Would Richard Dawkins Do?)