How to interpret a negative leave accrual situation

[Dee2016]

Hi, 

I've got a complicated situation where an employee didn't have enough accrued leave to be paid for all of the annual shut-down period and the boss felt sorry for him (because the employee was in financial difficulty) and instructed me pay annual leave regardless.

Since then, the employee has all-but abandoned his job by only working sporadically in the weeks following the shut-down.  It's at a stalemate situation where the boss is refusing to fire him (because he doesn't think the employee should be able to go and claim unemployment benefit due to having lost his job!) and the employee hasn't resigned, but isn't turning up to work now at all!

The boss wants to know what the current leave situation with the employee is and I don't know how to work it out - I'm finding the leave report confusing - and when I try to simulate doing a final pay (with zero work hours) for the employee, the results don't make sense to me.

Can somebody please help?!

Denise

[jenniek]

Hi @Dee2016 

While the employee is still employed he is still acruing leave at his ordinary hours per week - whether he is working these or not. Depending on which Payroll programme you are using - you should be using unpaid leave to record hours not worked. However he is still effectively earning leave anyway. If he left - he would get 8% of his earnings for the current year +/- any leave he had taken in advance. If another anniversary year rolls over - then he would receive another years entitlement - which you would be liable to pay.

[Dee2016]

Hi Jennie,

Thank you so much for replying to my post!  Your explanation that the employee is still accruing leave at his ordinary hours per week makes sense to me.

I am using MYOB Essentials Payroll and, as you've probably guessed, I didn't realise that I should have been recording the unworked time as unpaid leave.  Should I retrospectively enter the employee's unpaid leave hours for each week that this has being going on?  If so, can I do this without having to cancel the other employees' pays?  Or is it a case of going back, deleting everything, and re-entering everything correctly?

Other questions that spring to mind are:

Does what I ought to do have any impact on the PAYE returns I've already submitted?

Does PAYDAY FILING have any effect on what I ought to do?

Any advice/instructions you can give me on how I actually go about fixing my errors would be greatly appreciated, Jennie.

Kind regards,

Dee

[Steven_M · Accepted solution]

Hi @Dee2016 

MYOB Essentials is a little bit different in terms of average weekly earnings and unpaid leave.

Generally, if an employee did not work for whatever reasons you wouldn't enter a pay for that employee. As the Average weekly earnings is based on the gross earnings for the 12 months since the date of the start of the pay period as you are not processing pay for them you are losing weeks at the top end. For example say I paid my employee $500 for one week and then for the next 51 weeks I paid them $100, the gross earnings for the 53 week would only be based on the 51 weeks of $100.

In most cases. if you have not paid the employee then you would need to file anything to the IRD for this be it through PAYE purposes or Payday filing.