My daughter needs help !

[Ruby]

My daughter finished her internship at the end of May this year. She today received an email from the payroll department to say that she has been over paid by just over £2000 and the email went on to give the company's bank details and ask for the money to be returned immediately.

During her internship a big chunk of her salary was made up in commission so her salary differed from month to month. Since she left she has not had access to her payslips as they were always sent to her work email address which she now doesn't have access to so had no way of knowing of whether she was over paid or not.

This situation has both shocked and distressed my daughter. She has spend her salary believing the money was due to her. She also cannot afford to pay The 2K back in one go, she is technically a university student.

Please could you help us with advice on how to handle this situation and what our legal recourse is.

Ruby x

[ULA]

The first thing that she needs to do is to write to her presumably now ex-employer and ask for a complete breakdown of the monies they believe are outstanding and for what reason and copies of her payslips. She also needs to state that until she has had such time as to verify their claim, she will not be paying any monies to them.

Did your daughter have any reason to believe that the money she was paid was incorrect? Even given a large proportion of her salary was commission based, I presume she knew details of the commission structure and what target she achieved each month and could therefore have an approximate idea of how much she was going to get paid each month. Did she have any concerns based on her estimation of what commission she should get that she was being overpaid?

There is also the fact that she may be able to resist recovery on a legal principle known as estoppel, which prevents anyone from taking action on a matter that has been already settled. For the defence of estoppel to apply in her situation:

1. her employer must generally have made a representation of fact which led your daughter to believe she was entitled to treat that money as her own;
2. your daughter, in good faith, must have “changed her position”, in other words spent some or all of the money;
3. the payment must not have been primarily caused by the fault of your daughter

However until your daughter has details that verify or not the claim made of the overpayment we can leave the estoppel argument if an when it is needed.

[Ruby]

My daughter has now received a breakdown of the over payment and it appears that the money she was paid was too much. She has already back £1000 and has asked to have a repayment plan set up for 12 months starting in September to repay the remainder.

She received a response back today to say it has to be done over 6 months starting this month!

Please could you advise how she can respond to them. Just a reminder that my daughter is also a student.

[Amethyst]

They won't get more than repayment over 12 months if they took her to court so I'd suggest she stick to her guns and reiterate that she will be paying £83.33 a month over 12 months from September, that anything in excess of this is unaffordable and will leave her in hardship. She's paid £1000 already, which she could also have paid monthly. Then start making the payments in September regardless. If her income/expenditure backs this up a court wouldn't order she pay more.