Ensuring eSignature Lawfulness for Payroll Deduction Authorization

How to eSign a document: e-signature lawfulness for Payroll Deduction Authorization

we're talking about unlawful deduction of wages and the thing we need to think about is what is a deduction and is it unlawful now when we think about a deduction we think about things like deducting for a car deducting for off sitting for your computer at home or something like that but a direction can also be you taxed as well because you're earning a certain amount of salary and some of that money is taken off for tax and not a deduction would be superelevation we are your employer see this is how much you're earning plus super or an include super so super is not considered a deduction in this environment but let's talk about deductions that are not things like Texas for the ati or PAYG withholding it's think about it as you are working and you're driving one of your and your employer is has told you that if you crash the car then you have to pay the excess now that is a payment that met and if you agree to that that's a payment that you're at you you're agreed to make to your employer this not necessarily means that your employee can deduct that directly out of your wages if in Windows you would need an agreement in writing to approve that deduction now some contracts have authorized offsets in deductions already in it and you would need to look at your employment contract to have a look to see if that's in there because that would mean that your employer may be able to do that because you've already provided to a Brittany limousines or aren't your employer said okay so if you take the car out and you crash it you pay the excess and let's say you crash the car all you have an accident and and the the insurance to get involved and your employer which is then you need to have an agreement in writing with your employee to take that money out of your pay now it's super complicated with deductions because you only need to pay what you can afford and that might not be at the same pay rate or legal that your employer wishes to take the money for instance your employer might to say I want all of it in your needs paper payroll usually you can say no to that or we can say yes we can say I want to pay you X amount of dollars in that next play round and I'll give you a certain amount of money moving always another way your employer might seek to deduct is if you quit your job and you don't give the appropriate notice period that's a little contract or provider than the National Employment Standards for example we'll just go back to the Fair Work Act and national employment standards it says that if you've been working for not more than a year then your employer and you are entitled to one weeks notice if you're employed for more than one year but less than three then it's two weeks notice so let's say you've been working for a year and a half and you're you must give your employer two weeks notice and you don't you decide overnight we're going to resign you're not a casual you're a part-time or full-time employee so you have to give your employer notice and you don't it's a matter for you in a certain manner for your employer but it but just remember that they could be a lawful deduction that gets made at that point if you are under an award that talks about you not providing the appropriate notice period then you need to think about whether your employers going to deduct the amount of notice period for pay for instance it might state that your employer is entitled to deduct one week's salary from that comes from your pain and they might go ahead and do that if you don't provide the appropriate Mochis but your employer is not allowed to withhold monies because you haven't handed back your okay who can we speak about this now if you feel that there's been a deduction from your salary on the wages that is unlawful for instance you took you took took two weeks sick leave and you already had one week sick leave a croute so your employer decides they're going to pay you or the rest of your pay but take it off as annually that's probably an animal deduction and regards to your annual leave because you need to approve that leave you need to ask for it at least to be okay it could be unlawful because your employer has decided you owe the money for some reason for instance yeah if we take the example of you using the company car and you have in an accident at night and your employer just takes the exists a little bit out of your wages that's an and there's no wrestling agreement for you to do that then that would level would more likely being a deduction for wages who can you go do to talk about that certainly the Fair Work Ombudsman might be able to give you some assistance there but certainly lawyers like myself and my team will be able to give you how about whether the deduction is unlawful or not we'll be able to talk you through about sort of things that you can do to assist in how to recover that monies and we can also talk to you about how to talk to your employer about that the deduction sometimes your employer might take the money out not realizing that a normal ow - sometimes your employer might take it out knowing them all out - and they don't care so there are different ways that we can communicate with your employer to a get recover that monies or Benny talk about how you can repay it in some way that makes sense I get questions all the time one of the questions I get is my employer is deducted money for a course I took can they do that the answer is actually I don't know we need to look at your employment contract we need to look at the awards we need to look at what sort of employment you have and what promises you've made and we need to look at what the policies and procedures state and we need to see if you provide them you ready seem to doubt that now some of those things and that criteria might exist in some of them might not but certainly actually it's really hard to answer that question off the bat another question has got it comes up as my boys told me that they've made a mistake in my wages and now they want me to pay it back do I have to do this the short answer is if it's a clerical error and they've done it by mistake in thin yes you are required to pay that money's bad but if it is not a clerical error and they've paid it to you and now they just want the money back then that is a far more complex answer broadly speaking that they're not entitled to money that they paid you purposefully but it does depend on the agreements that you sign what the policies state how much money they want back and within your network so again obviously there's some complexity there there's some things that you could probably answer in some things that you probably can't so we would encourage you to speak to someone who probably knows more about it then perhaps your employer like again we can help you have that conversation with your employer we can help you try to recover some of that monies back from employers another question we get is I've put my job and I owe my employer money do I have to pay it back well if you know that you owe money to your employer and there's been some sort of agreement there that you do pay that money back just resigning your job is not going to release you from that obligation there are other ways where employer can seek to recover that monies they can certainly seek to recover it in the courts and the very limited circumstance if they might be able to seek to recover that money than in some sort of small claims court or tribunal like in Queensland cupid's but that is under very limited circumstances if you find that you have put yourself at the Sun some sort of debt with your employer and there are some issues with having to pay that back then we can help you have a current conversation with your employer about how you're going to pay it back there are other organizations that might be on helping us with government or no sanctions out there that can cess but before you seek to go financially bankrupt for instance we would encourage you to look at mediation some sort of conciliation process some sort of debt agreement relationship or more arrangements that you can enter into with your employer or ex employer to be able to pay that monies back thank you for watching [Music] you