OREGON OBSERVATIONS 15 AUGUST 2022 Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / By admin Let me help you unpack this one. In this case, the town where it happened doesn’t matter. Seven months ago, the company that handles Bend’s St. Charles Health System suffered a ransomware attack, freezing all their timecard data. They reverted to manual systems to keep paying healthcare workers while their records were locked up. Now that they’re back online, and’ve reconstructed actual time-worked data, they’re asking for the 2,358 affected healthcare workers to pay back their share of the $2 million that was overpaid due to the attack. As you can imagine, the employees involved are up in arms. But here’s the deal. Those workers knew there was a breach, and that there was a potential for overpayment during the time the real timecards were unavailable. Instead of treating the event like an early Christmas present, what they SHOULD’VE done was kept track of their regular hours and overtime hours, compare those numbers with their paycheck, and hold back a little each month to defray the eventual costs of a repayment. Any of them that didn’t, were no different than a troop I had to give a counseling statement to back in my Army days. He has bouncing checks all over the Kaserne, and during the session when asked for an explanation, he told me, and he was serious, that HE had his checkbook, and therefore the bank didn’t know how much money he had in his account. The moral of the story is this. There are a LOT of people out there who treat any overtime pay as if it were their regular wages, and instead of setting it aside for emergencies, or special purchases, they begin to count on its recurring presence as if it was part of their base pay. Of course, when the overtime stops, or is interrupted, they melt down as if the employer is robbing them at gunpoint. It’s like a game of musical chairs. You need to have a plan for when the music stops. If you don’t, you’ll be sitting on the floor, or in this illustration, staring at an empty wallet. 4 3
