He called me within the hour and said, “Please don’t send those screenshots to anyone else.” I asked why, and he immediately started explaining that the eleven vacation days had been entered as a “provisional adjustment” during an audit. I told him that made no sense because I had never requested those days and had worked every one of them. He went quiet, then admitted the manager who entered them had been instructed to “clean up” unused vacation balances before the restructuring. I asked whether that meant they had deliberately removed days from employees before terminating them. He said, “I can’t discuss the other employees,” which was answer enough.
I asked him to put everything in writing, and he refused. So I sent the screenshots to my attorney along with my time records and every vacation request I had submitted over the previous year. My attorney discovered that the same manager had entered vacation days for six other employees who were terminated that quarter. In every case, the employees had more unused days than the company later paid them for. The total amount wasn’t enormous individually, but across all seven employees it was more than $40,000. Then my attorney found something even worse: the entries had all been made on the same afternoon in January, months before any of us knew our jobs were being eliminated.
The company eventually admitted the entries were unauthorized and offered to pay me the missing eleven days. I told them I wasn’t interested in being the only person compensated when the same thing had happened to six others. My attorney sent a demand covering every affected employee, and suddenly the company became very cooperative. They paid the full vacation balances, corrected the payroll records, and dismissed the manager who had entered them. A few weeks later, one of my former coworkers called and said she had checked her own records because of what I found. She was missing nineteen vacation days. That was when I realized my final paycheck hadn’t been short because of a mistake—it was short because someone had been counting on all of us leaving before we looked closely.
