Back Pay

I'm not sure how we allowed this to happen but we did. Partly out of our own ignorance I suppose and partly because it is just so confusing to figure all of it out. I hope it is more of the latter than the former and soon, we should be well on our way of figuring all this out so it won't happen again.

I like to do our taxes early in February. I know victims of tax fraud, i.e. somebody other than them filed their taxes to receive a large refund and it took them a long long time to get things sorted out again. The number one way to combat this crime is to file your taxes before they do and so that is what I do. However, while figuring out our taxes for 2021, I noticed that my wife's pay is down from last year, quite a bit. This shouldn't be and so it had me asking her questions and in turn she asking questions to the chief financial guru in her organization. 

My wife's doesn't receive a salary per se. She gets paid depending on the complexity of the patient she cares for and the number of patients she sees. Due to her promotion a couple years back which also gave her extra duties, she also has a guaranteed minimum salary to compensate for the loss of patients she could undergo in order to complete those extra duties though she has the ability and usually does see enough patients to carry her past that threshold. So her actual base pay varies from year to year. She also gets paid for those extra management duties on top of whatever her base pay. Also, her office recently did away with paying for her personal scribe a few years ago. This was a person who typed out my wife's dictated notes which helped allow her to see more patients than those coworkers who have to do all their own note typing. It was a gradual transition with my wife's employer paying for half of the scribes cost down to my wife paying the full cost starting partway through 2020. So 2021 was the first full year my wife deducted the full cost of a scribe (it was really unclear how much this is costing my wife) which is why we were slow to recognize that something wasn't right.

So my wife finally sat down with the chief financial guru and they came to a number of startling conclusions. A) they weren't calculating my wife's base pay correctly and have been underpaying her. B) they weren't paying her at all for her extra management duties. C) these two things have been going on for maybe a couple years. D) They aren't sure how much the scribe is getting paid or who is actually paying for her. We are assuming the scribe is indeed getting paid as they are still showing up and doing their work. 

The company is of course apologetic and my wife is understandably frustrated. I am trying to be the mediator of sorts that as long as everything gets identified and fixed, that will be the most important aspect. We have lived with the underpayment and got along and still were able to save up money towards retirement. Sure we lost some investment power by not having had this money back when it was earned, possibly as much as two years ago, but eventually we will get a check for all the back pay and can invest it as we see fit going forward. Perhaps most of all, it has been a learning experience that just because you receive a paycheck created and printed by a computer and some software, doesn't mean it is necessarily correct. For me, the worst part of this is that when I pay taxes for next year for 2022, it will be another anomaly in a long line of pay anomalies (due to a lump sum check for all the missing back pay) so I still won't have anything to compare against.