A few months ago, some county employees were informed that they owed the county back taxes due to an HR and payroll department error. "The most recent mistake has resulted in me needing to work 40 hours with no pay to pay back the county, for their own negligence in paying taxes," says Courtney Guthrie, a county employee with the public library.
According to Guthrie, she received a call from the HR Director stating that nine other Alamance County employees also had to repay back taxes. However, Guthrie was the only part-time employee that was affected, so she couldn't pay off the debt using PTO or other benefits.
The letter that she received from the Human Resources department stated that the mandatory FICA and Medicare tax deductions for the 2021 tax year were not deducted properly, as well as the first three months of 2022.
Cheryl Ray, the Human Resources Director for Alamance County, says that the department faced a glitch in their payroll software that caused deductions not to be activated from the employees affected. The department uncovered this issue through their recordkeeping process, and they worked with the county's CPA (Certified Public Accountant) firm to resolve the issue.
In handling that resolve, Ray states that the department "reached out to the employees impacted right away and informed them of the situation, the steps needed to legally remedy, and provided them a series of options for repayment." These options included "lump sum, a series of payroll deductions over the rest of this calendar year, or an offset of accruals that have a dollar liability," she added.
Although this occurred, Ray stated that employees were not required to repay all of the employee portions of the FICA/Medicare taxes, per the CPA's recommendation. Ray asserts that the issue is "very small scale and was due to a system error."
Guthrie added that the department's clock-in/clock-out system, KRONOS was also subjected to a ransomware attack in December 2021-January 2022 that affected all Alamance County's employees' pay. As a result, the employees were paid the same amount throughout that period as they were paid in November 2021. This led to county employees receiving a substantial amount of excess pay.
Instead of absorbing these costs "due to their own poor cyber security," county employees were informed that Alamance County would be subtracting the surplus payments from their next paychecks, Guthrie stated. She added that the current Director of Alamance County Libraries, Susana Goldman paid the department over a thousand dollars out-of-pocket to quickly resolve the issue.
Even though the issues have now apparently been resolved, Guthrie finds the mistakes to be "suspicious" and "becoming increasingly odd." However, at this time, no evidence would suggest that these discrepancies were caused by anything other than system errors.
