In New Zealand, there is a long list of companies who need to reach out to a large number of current and former employees, and try to convince them to go to a website and enter sensitive information to receive some money (1). Where I'm working, we found it hard, even for current employees, to convince them that it's not either phishing, or a phishing test.

This is getting off-topic, but I found it interesting so I'll include more details anyway.

In a lot of cases, all the fuss is to return amounts that are tiny, and yet the companies need to keep reaching out and trying to convince people. I got $0.06 (2) from my current employer. Because I've moved countries with them, I ended up falling in the category of needing to provide some bank/tax details. Of course, I wanted to log in with the silliest OS I could think of to test/mess with the tracking dashboard, and so somehow I managed to enter my DOB wrong, which even further increased the back-and-forward and emails involved (I was in the project, so the Payroll peeps involved probably didn't hold it against me).

The re-calculation which led to the payment actually worked out that I had been underpaid in come calculations, but overpaid by far more (although still very, very little) in others. The company believed they couldn't offset, so all the fuss was for a tiny amount, which I felt I really wasn't owed anyway. Also unfortunate, was that if any former employee didn't bother to claim the amount because it's so small it's not worth the fuss, it just leads to more work in follow-ups.

New Zealand Holidays Act is quite an interesting area in general, in a how-can-it-possibly-be-this-hard kind of way. I think it contributes to the reputation of NZ payroll being one of the trickiest in the world.

1) https://thespinoff.co.nz/business/27-06-2019/cheat-sheet-wha...

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JaggedNZ 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Or IRD (NZ tax dept.) a few years back sending out a survey on a .co.nz domain. Gave their security team a hard time for that one!

	▲	Nition 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		IRD's phone calling campaign about enabling two-factor auth was also not great.

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eru 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If the amounts are so tiny, couldn't the company just voluntarily overpay everyone by three dollars a year and call it a day?

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red369 6 days ago | parent [-]

Only most of the amounts were tiny, so all the effort for the re-calculation was still needed for everyone (basically either building a payroll engine from scratch, or paying someone else to use theirs). You're right, that for most current employees, for the small amounts it actually is much simpler. You can just email and slip it into the regular payroll.

It is the former employees for up to 15 years that make the contacting step difficult. They all need to provide bank/tax details.

There are also some current employees who still have to provide details before they can be paid. The company I work for has a lot of people moving countries, and therefore tax jurisdictions. In addition, some employers decided it was worth asking if employees were prepared to voluntarily allow offsetting between the overpayments and the underpayments, as in some cases those were quite large.

I can understand not wanting to give large amounts of money where it effectively would just balance out, especially after spending staggering amounts on the recalculation itself. There are government departments that have been working on it for years (or perhaps worse, and paying consulting companies to work on it).

Edit: I should have said, I did see companies rounding all amounts up to some small amount, like $1, so your suggestion is good. It just doesn't save effort on recalculation, or much effort in getting people to dig the email out of their trash folder and provide their information to receive their $1.

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eru 6 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks for the detailed answer.

> It is the former employees for up to 15 years that make the contacting step difficult. They all need to provide bank/tax details.

Give people 30 dollars extra on their way out, and only contact them when you used up that budget? (Should take care of the majority of cases?)

> Edit: I should have said, I did see companies rounding all amounts up to some small amount, like $1, so your suggestion is good. It just doesn't save effort on recalculation, or much effort in getting people to dig the email out of their trash folder and provide their information to receive their $1.

Oh, my suggestion was to do the calculation, as arduously as you describe, compare with what you already overpaid earlier voluntarily, and if the company is still in the green, then don't bother contacting anyone.

Or is that not possible?

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red369 4 days ago | parent [-]

I think when companies found out that they had an issue with their Payroll software calculations, they mostly tried to solve it as quickly as possible, to put a line in the sand - from that point onwards at least, no additional errors were being made. But they still had many years in the past, of issues which needed to be fixed.

I think what you're proposing probably would have worked for reducing the communication issues in the future for any employees who left after that. I didn't hear of anyone who did that, but that definitely doesn't mean it didn't happen. Likely no one thought of it because I would guess most people didn't expect it to take as long as it did to fix. That the people who left while the recalculation was going on would just be a few more compared to everyone who had left in the previous 7 or 10 or 15 years (I think different companies came to different opinions for the time period they needed to retrospectively fix).

	▲	eru 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's a shame that the bureaucrats / politicians / voters who are responsible for these hard-to-comply-with rules will never bear the costs.

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noduerme 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

How hard would it be to print out a letter on company letterhead and circulate it in the office or snailmail it to the employees?