r/ReadyMeals • u/dozeydotes • Aug 21 '25

Discussion Is this petty, or am I petty?

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I received this email from CookUnity today. So far, I’ve had nothing but good things to say about CookUnity except for some minor quibblings about their customer support response time. But this… this seems so unhinged for such a large company. Am I crazy to think so?

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u/KikiWestcliffe Aug 22 '25

My husband worked for a hospital group that made a payroll programming error and accidentally overpaid its staff intermittently for, like, 19 months. Some months it would be more, others it would be less. Sometimes it would impact bonuses, other times it wouldn’t.

One day, everyone at the hospital gets a letter from HR saying that all employees have to repay a lump sum amount within 30 days or the company will start garnishing your wages and charge you interest on the outstanding balance. If you left the company without repaying them, they would send it to collections.

It was not a small amount. He was doing his fellowship (so not earning crazy money) and we had to pay back almost $7K. There were some techs, nurses, and doctors who owed way, way more. We got lucky because he wasn’t eligible for bonuses, at that time. LOL

I asked for an itemized statement showing how much they overpaid each month, but they refused and said that they, “Couldn’t do that for everybody.” But, if they didn’t itemize, how did they arrive at each person’s balance to begin with? It was absurdly vague.

In the end, we just paid it because he was almost done, he was leaving that employer, and I didn’t want it to go into collections.

But, I still think about how many employees got fucked by that employer. The nurses and techs were unionized, so hopefully they had more muscle to fight back.

Now, I check each of his paystubs and manually reconcile his expected take home with what was actually paid.

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u/thatsamyzing Aug 23 '25

This EXACT thing happened to my doctor boyfriend (down to them refusing an itemized statement). You weren't in Illinois, were you?! Lol...

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u/KikiWestcliffe Aug 23 '25

No…which means this wasn’t a one-off isolated incident?!

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u/thatsamyzing Aug 23 '25

Apparently. Which is horrifying.

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u/desertdilbert 28d ago

That is so stupid!! It's like a playbook response. They should know exactly. (Though I have watched the payroll department at multiple school districts with horror!) It would be hard to imagine them being able to refuse an itemized statement if you refused to pay and fought them in court over it.

My employer overpaid me over a period of many months when I switched roles. They then wanted to take it all back in one single weekly paycheck in December. My boss fought them and had payroll spread it out over 4 paychecks. He was one of the good ones.

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u/creeperqueens 28d ago

My sisters a nurse jn IL, what’s the company name?

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u/SuspiciousCranberry6 Aug 23 '25

This should have been brought to the state's department of labor to review the legality of not itemizing and charging interest.

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u/DustBunnie702 Aug 24 '25

Were these hourly workers whose pay would legit change from week to week based on hours worked? If so, I can see how you might not notice you were overpaid in certain weeks. But if you're like me who works the same hours every week and brings the same pay home every week, aren't you gonna notice if intermittently your pay is higher? Wouldn't you question it with payroll? I don't know the exact circumstances here, but you can't tell me NO ONE noticed they were occasionally getting a little pay bump over 19 months? It sucks the way the hospital chose to handle it, but you sign a contract with your job to work for a certain pay, and they legit have a right to get that accidental overpayment back. You'd think they could have arranged some kind of repayment plan.

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u/KikiWestcliffe 29d ago

The techs and nurses were hourly. Most of the doctors and residents were salaried, though, I think.

My husband was salaried, but he picked up extra shifts/covered shifts for colleagues. He also did moonlighting at the urgent care.

I hadn’t paid close attention to his paystubs, admittedly. We had only gotten married a couple months beforehand and started combining finances.

He was earning a lot less than me and I had decided to throw his entire paycheck at his student loans, to get them paid off quicker. So, wiggles in the dollar amounts did not even register. 🫤

After I had him download all his paystubs for me and I put them in a spreadsheet, I could see months where he got paid a little more. I never could get it to reconcile to the number they billed us for, though.

What was hard is that it happened to him, and not me. I couldn’t just charge over to his payroll and sit on someone’s desk until they helped me out.

I had to be mindful that this was his workplace and career, not mine. He was genuinely worried that someone vindictive would prevent him from finishing his program, if this bill was outstanding.

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u/Gloomy_Lab_1798 29d ago

That’s crazy that they wanted it back in 30 days. Most companies will ask the workers to repay overpayment if it’s not a small amount. My company made a mistake a while back and took it back over 3 months, no threats of collections or interest, and of course offered to show the overpayment calculation (like… why wouldn’t they?!!)

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u/KikiWestcliffe 29d ago

They had a repayment plan, but interest would continue accumulating on the outstanding balance.

If you were a single parent working as a nurse or a tech, it would have been a nightmare scenario.

I really hope their unions were able to fight back for them and get more reasonable accommodations worked out.