My Boss wants me to correct checks paid to us I work for a county government. We process over 16,000 checks over about 2 months. I have an issue with some things we do. If someone writes a check out wrong, for example if he doesn't put the correct change in either the box or Written Out, we have to change it. If someone writes in the box 285.00 but Written says eighty five 00/100 my boss will make us write it in ourselves. I don't feel comfortable changing someone else's check. I just want to find out whether this is legal to do or not.
On a check, if the two amounts do not match, the written out amount should be considered correct. Section 3.114 of the Uniform Commercial Code states that: If an instrument contains contradictory terms, typewritten terms prevail over printed terms, handwritten terms prevail over both, and words prevail over numbers. So, you simply accept the check for the written out amount. DO NOT make changes to the document because that is fraudulent. If the amounts do not agree, you can't pick which one you want to use - you must use the written amount. If the written amount is incorrect, your only choice is to reject the check or accept it for the written amount (and bill for or refund the difference).
You can read about your rights as a California tenant at http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/landlordbook/catenant.pdf This is rather ridiculous: 1) No judge will evict someone for paying rent by mail. (I assume you have the new landlord's address.) 2) If the landlord cashes the check you mail then he's not going to be able to claim you didn't pay the rent. If he actually refuses to cash your mailed check then that's all to the good for you. 3) You can ignore any requirements imposed by the new landlord that aren't in the lease, just as the landlord could ignore any new requirement imposed on him by you. Even some terms in a lease can be ignored, because not all terms in a contract are legal. (This is especially the case in tenant-landlord law.) If you think there will be trouble then use certified mail.
You have no legal duty to inform callers they have the wrong number. Official business is not carried out by telephone, despite the fact that some collection agencies commonly use the tactic that there is service of process forthcoming, or some other legal jargon, to entice a callback. From a non-legal perspective, you may want to call and tell them to take you off their call list and that they have the wrong number; otherwise, they are likely to continue to bother you day and night. It appears to be either a scam or a collections attempt.
The relevant part of Texas law is in the property code, §§92.101-92.109 §92.104 allows them to "deduct from the deposit damages and charges for which the tenant is legally liable under the lease or as a result of breaching the lease", and then they must "give to the tenant the balance of the security deposit, if any, together with a written description and itemized list of all deductions" (except when there is uncontroversial rent owed). §92.109 states what the landlord's liability is, namely a landlord who in bad faith retains a security deposit in violation of this subchapter is liable for an amount equal to the sum of $100, three times the portion of the deposit wrongfully withheld, and the tenant's reasonable attorney's fees in a suit to recover the deposit. This requires bad faith, not just being wrong. If you dispute the deductions, you can sue the landlord to recover the deposit. The law also provides that "In an action brought by a tenant under this subchapter, the landlord has the burden of proving that the retention of any portion of the security deposit was reasonable". In order to extract more money from you for putative damages, the landlord will have to sue you and establish that there was an additional $2,000 damages. If the court finds that you did actually did damage the apartment, you may be ordered to compensate the landlord. Until you get such an order, you don't owe them anything; you may be able to recover the damage deposit if the "damage" was insignificant. This sketches the process of suing in Justice Court to get your deposit back, highlighting details like the demand letter that you might not have known you have to write. As far as your credit history is concerned, this is not entirely clear. The Fair Credit Reporting Act regulates the industry of credit reporting, and crucially you can dispute false claims of debts. This does not prevent a person from making such a claim. I do not have an account with the Big 3 reporting services, so I don't know what their standards are for recording a putative debt. However, you can insert a suitable statement in your record disputing the validity of the claim. It is most likely that the landlord would sell the putative debt to a collection agency. That industry is regulated by the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and there is a procedure about disputing an alleged debt.
They can't simply keep the money; that's against the law. But in a situation like this, it's easy to get lost in the bureaucracy. The company may be in violation of different laws, re: For Your Information | United States Department of Labor, so you can try pointing this out in another email or letter. The threat of the Feds or other enforcement agency looking into the matter may make something happen. Or, try this: find the CEO (or a similarly high-ranked executive) on LinkedIn; many have open messaging in interest of good PR. Message/email them and carefully (and nicely) explain the situation. (A CEO will likely have an assistant monitoring their LinkedIn account. But, there are many stories of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos personally responding to emails.) Someone will make it happen and the employees who have not been helpful will be in hot water.
So these are the basic rules of the tax game: The taxpayer (employee, in this case) is liable for tax on income earned by him. On occasion, the payor of the income to be received by the taxpayer is required to withhold tax on the payment, remit the withheld tax to the IRS/state/local tax authority and pay the balance over to the taxpayer. If that happens, the taxpayer is entitled to a credit against his taxes for the amount withheld by the payor. Failure by the payor to withhold the required amount of tax does NOT excuse the taxpayer from paying tax on the income he earned. So company B is right.
It is not illegal to treat the employees differently. As long as nobody is being paid for less than the time worked, this is legal. Treating employees differently because of protected characteristics is unlawful discrimination. However, the duration you have worked there is not a protected characteristic. It is perfectly legal for the employer not to mandate new employees clock in and out. It would even be legal (if not a great idea) to hire new employees for twice as much.
The difficulty is that tips are, by statute, considered a form of wages rather than a form of self-employment income for the tipped employee for income tax purposes (in contrast, employers don't have to keep track of tips for minimum wage purposes, tipped employees just have an extremely low minimum wage+). (If it was self-employment income, withholding and paying self-employment tax which is paid in lieu of FICA taxes, would be solely the employee's problem and none of the employer's business.) A comment notes, probably correctly, that: If wages plus tips do not add up to the full regular (non-tipped) minimum wage, the employer must pay the difference. This is not well-enforced, however. So, employers have a duty to report to the IRS and withhold taxes from their best estimate of combined wages and tips in a manner authorized by IRS regulations. If they don't, the employers face stiff penalties from the IRS for failing to withhold taxes. There are tax regulations and other forms of official guidance governing when it is permissible to infer tips on cash payments in this fashion. It isn't truly &quot;wage theft&quot;. The employee still gets whatever the actual tip is, and the employer still doesn't get the tip itself. Instead, what the employer does is withhold taxes for the benefit of the employee (and with respect to FICA an equal share of employer obligations withholding) based upon estimated wages and tips combined. The income tax withholding is annually reconciled (in theory anyway) against actual taxes owed on the annual tax return. If you maintain good records, you might get audited, but you'd probably win. If you maintain sloppy records or don't keep track at all, you'd probably lose in an audit. To reconcile the error in income tax reporting in federal tax law, the waiter files a 1040 with the W-2 from the employer. The waiter reports the amount withheld in one box. The waiter reports the correct amount of wages and salary and tips rather than the incorrect amount in the wage and salary box. The waiter files a supplement to the tax return page explaining the that W-2 is inaccurate. The waiter calculates tax and shows entitlement to a refund, and the IRS either writes a check or audits after which the IRS or if there is no agreement the tax court decides who is right. Cash tips should be logged daily by the waiter and regularly deposited. (I've done this before personally, with success in the audit process, in cases of erroneous 1099s for my personal taxes.) Reconciling errors in FICA withholdings is rather more difficult, but erroneous overwithholding still provides a benefit to the employee, and the employee's survivors, in the long run in that case. This is done in the form of larger Social Security benefit checks that are based on the inflated wage and tip estimate and the actual FICA taxes paid. If the employee actually receives more cash tips than reported by the employer and doesn't correctly increase the amount in a tax return, the tipped employee is actually engaged in petty tax evasion (and, in practice, excess cash tips are rarely reported). The circumstances under which a fixed percentage may be properly set and what it should be are too technical for an answer here. Systemically, the problem with the applicable regulations is that the inferred tip percentage is benchmarked against the tips paid on credit card payments, per IRS guidance and permission, but actually, customers tip at lower percentages of the bill when paying in cash than when paying via credit card. This is a flaw in the law, but it doesn't represent impropriety on the part of the employer.