I am a state employee in New York state. In a non-leap year year I work X number of days. During a leap year I work X+1 days (as long as 2/29 does not fall on a Saturday or Sunday) Not only am I not paid for that day (being a salaried employee)but my pay is decreased a small amount to make up for that day. Double jeopardy!! Am I being cheated or is this normal accounting technique??? Any help would be appreciated.
Normal accounting techique is all about cheating you. I’d explain more, but when I explained suspense accounts on this board, some accountant buried me under a stack of general ledgers.
If you are paid a yearly salary (and most NYS employees are), you aren’t being cheated. You’re getting the amount entitled to you for a year (1/1 - 12/31).
Want to explain that one? You are making it sound like two different events
1)you aren’t paid for the day
2)your pay is decreased a small amount to make up for the day.
I don’t believe your employer actually lowers your annual salary since it is a leap year. Rather I am sure you make the same annual salary but rather if you worked 250 days in a non-leap year and 251 in a leap year you make slightly less per day. So you can’t say you arent’ paid for the day AND paid less on other days. You are either not paid for the day and paid the same for the other days or paid for the day but paid slightly less for all the days.
But before you get too bent out of shape realize that even from year to year you may not work the same number of days per year because of how the weekends are laid out. You may have more weekend days and fewer workdays in one year and more workdays and fewer weekend days in another.
And what about your landlord? He charges you, say, $300 a month in rent. Most months, that’s $9.68 a day. But for four months it’s an even $10. And in February, that’s $10.71 a day. Is he trying to make up for higher utilities or something? :D:D
If you’re paid on a monthly or yearly schedule, you make the same in leap and non-leap years. On average, you work 5/7 of an extra day each leap year. If you’re paid weekly or biweekly, you’d get a little extra pay that year (actually it’s not quite that simple. You’d get a 53rd paycheck every 5 or six years. Without leap years, it would be every 7 years.)
If you’re paying monthly rent or mortgage, your rent doesn’t go up for February in leap years. I think interest is annual, so it wouldn’t change. The pro-rata amounts would be different in leap vs. non-leap years. So it mostly works out in the end. Just don’t eat or use any utilities that day, and you’ll balance out perfectly your loss in pay. Or you could spend the next 3 1/2 years finding a job which pays weekly or biweekly, and come out ahead each leap year.
[sidetrack]
I get paid by the hour. During daylight savins time I get paid extra because I work nights. When we set the clocks foward I only work 7 hours, but I get paid for 8. When we set the clocks back I work 9 hours, and they pay me for 9.
Everytime there are two ways to calculate things, the person doing the calculating does it in their own favor.
Same with rounding, etc. I’ve had bosses who processed 5% across-the-board pay raises by figuring 5% then rounding down to the nearest $1,000/year. Then the pay is rounded down to the nearest $1/pay period, then deductions are removed and the last penny is rounded away from you, they are so greedy.
So, why the original rounding at all, if it doesn’t end up round? It’s a crock is what it is.
Cheating by always calculating in the calculator’s favor may be human nature, may be normal accounting technique, but it is still cheating.
I think it’s best to get paid every 2 weeks. That way you are always guaranteed 26 paychecks a year. (At least I think you are.)
So, twice a year there is a month when you get paid three times instead of twice. And in those “bonus” months, some deductions that are taken on a monthly basis, like my parking and some insurance, aren’t deducted!
I celebrate that paycheck by spending all the extra money on some foolish purchase. After all, it’s free money isn’t it?
I’m also a NYS employee. I don’t know for how NYS figures it,( because I’ve never kept the same pay long enough) but if you’re a salaried employee as I am now, you can’t really say you don’t get paid for the day any more than I can say I didn’t get paid for the five extra hours I worked last month. Salaried employees get paid $X per year,no matter how many hours or days they work. Hourly employees get paid $X per hour. If they work more hours in a leap year,they get paid more. Of course, biweekly paychecks and a payroll lag can make it difficult to figure out how much you earned in a particular year. For example, if I get a paycheck on 1/2/02, I actually earned all of that money by 12/19/01, but it will show on my tax forms for 2002. The next pay period will cross years , so some of that money will have been earned in 2001 and some in 2002.If instead of a biweekly pay check, we were paid monthly or twice per month ( say the 1st and 15- not the same as biweekly),there wouldn’t be any difference from one year’s paycheck to the next.
Reality Chuck- small quibble- I don’t think most NYS employees are salaried.
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I work on financial computer systems, we always round off. I’ve never seen rounding down.
What your company is doing is wrong. When you round off, half of the time you are ahead, the other half you are behind, and it works out, on average, equal. When you round down, you always lose unless you happen to be right on it. If you round down to the nearest $1,000.00, then on average you are cheated out of $500.00. If the pay is rounded down to the nearest $1 and then down to the nearest cent, you are cheated out of 50 1/2 cents/check. If you are paid bi-monthly, that is $6.06 per year.
What bothers me the most about this plan is not that you are getting cheated (you certainly are getting cheated), but that the lower paid workers are being cheated more. The way I figure, if you apply rounding down as you described, a 5% raise on $40K works out to 3.735%, but if you make $100K, it works out to 4.494%, If you make 200K, you are can expect on average to get 4.747%
Your company is evil.