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IT Contractors In Australia Are Not Being Paid Due To Dispute With Payroll Service (theregister.co.uk)
New submitter evolutionary writes: Plutus Payroll, an Australian payroll company, is refusing to pay contractors due to a dispute with companies using their services. Around 1,000 IT workers are unable to receive payment for services rendered. One may ask, "Where are the companies who actually hired the IT workers?" The Register reports: "This story starts with Australia's employment laws, which see lots of contractors officially employed by recruitment companies or payroll companies. The company at which the contractor works likes this arrangement as it means they don't have to put such people on their books. Recruitment companies and payroll companies charge for the service. Contractors generally like the convenience of having one employer even though they hop from gig to gig. The system requires fluid payments. Companies who hire contractors pay the recruiter, which either pays contractors direct or pays the payroll company contractors prefer. If the cash stops flowing, contractors get crunched. That's what's happened to around 1,000 contractors who elected to use Plutus as their paymasters: the company says it is in the midst of a completely unexplained 'dispute' that leaves it unable to pay contractors, or receive money from recruitment companies, but is still solvent. The Register has checked with the bank that Plutus clients say sends them their money -- the bank says it is aware of no dispute. One possible reason for the mess is that Plutus did not charge for its services. How it made money is therefore a mystery. Another scenario concerns the company's recent acquisition: perhaps its new owners are being denied access to some service Plutus could access as a standalone company. Plutus is saying nothing of substance about the situation. A spokesperson tells us the company deeply regrets the situation but won't divulge anything about the dispute and has offered no details about when contractors can expect resolution."
In other news, closer to the US, Canadian government workers are not getting paid due to a screw up in the payroll system. This has been going on for several months and isn't fixed yet:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/1...
https://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Wow. Can't even read the title of the post properly? Darn.
hmm... Austria != Australia or I must be missing something...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
You sir, are an idiot.
After I was out of work for two years (2009-2010) and filed for Chapter Seven bankruptcy in 2011, I spent the next two years working multiple assignments from three different contracting agencies. All three used ADP for payroll. I would've been screwed if ADP threw a fit.
One is just the British spelling. The Brits seem to have a bit of a flourish when it comes to the Queen's English.
the company says it is in the midst of a completely unexplained 'dispute'
the bank says it is aware of no dispute.
Plutus did not charge for its services. How it made money is therefore a mystery.
Plutus is saying nothing of substance about the situation.
Slashdot: no information required.
All the people replying are the idiots. It's obviously a joke. Sheesh.
In the US if you refuse to pay regular employees, the Feds come sniffing around looking to charge you with fraud and other nasty things... Contractors can be out of luck, but even they have fairly decent legal recourse that 95% of the time comes out in their favor in court and usually awards them legal costs and punitive damages for bad faith behavior, especially if they have a reasonable contract.
After going through this once as a contractor, I now insist on weekly paychecks, with no more than a 7 day delay from invoice to paycheck, and if it doesn't show up, I stop working and start looking for my next engagement after I call the client offering to come down and pick up my missing check, assuming they can't find it/in the works/other BS excuse for not having it.
Not paying your legitimate employees for hours worked should never be a negotiation tactic. Most companies are smart enough to know this.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
An historian observes that if a few Plutus execs were shot-dead that with-held contractors monies would come rolling out like infield singles against the Cleveland defense!
This is likely to attract attention from the tax office and backfire horribly. In Australia it doesn't matter what you are called, if you make 80% of your income from that source, you may be deemed an employee. This payroll company may suddenly find itself with a large number of employees and the super and leave liabilities that go with it.
They must mean they are made of mostly water. Because the definition of financial solvency means you can pay your bills.
They claim to be solvent. how the fuck is a company that is not paying its obligations is solvent? is the company saying that it is not indebted to the people they were supposed to be paying already? in that case, the contractors are fucked. and should get the company bankrupted.
if the company was actually doing it's service for free(taking no extra fee for providing the service, mind you) then it would be pretty probable that someone, the new owners perhaps, took out the money they were supposed to be paying onwards. and why would anyone run a business like that? well, to sell the business - easy to make lots of in/out money for the business that looks good on paper(To an idiot) if you don't actually make any profit except interest rates perhaps for holding the money for a month or whatever.
If I had to wager though, what happened is that they blew contract renewal with their IT contractor and they are unable to know who they are supposed to pay and what.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
ah, the old 4chan two-step. say something remarkably stupid, and then when you get called on it, claim you were trolling.
It's been a few years, but my last experience in contracting like this was that the recruiter MADE themselves non-optional. In order to access the recruitment service (primarily to reduce the time invested in screening applicants), companies have to agree to make the payments to the recruiter. Advertisements for positions are made by the recruiter and don't include details of who the actual company is, until after you're under contract.
Additionally, companies and contractors are in breach of contract if they tell each other what they are paying/being paid by the recruiter. My last employer "accidentally" let me find out this information, and suffice to say the recruiter was making a very nice profit. AND you're required to not work for the employer directly for a period of time after the contract ends.
"Sorry, I can't pay you my dues now. Ah, no, I can't tell you exactly why".
They gave me the shaft :-(
This is highlighting a bit of a problem with putting employees at arms length to provide a legal fiction to dodge tax and other obligations - you have to be able to trust everyone else in the chain you are using to attempt to fool others.
These middlemen exist really due to the deliberate complications of pretending an employee is not an employee where it's far more efficient to handle such deception in bulk.
It's far less complicated with real contractors and it's far more effective to contract them directly instead of via a middleman, but once the contract extends beyond a certain length if they are not contracted to anyone else it starts to get very complicated since they are now de-facto employees. So real contractors (instead of employees under a legal fiction) and the company they contact to on a job are better off dealing with each other directly since they gain nothing by a middleman.
In this case it looks like the middleman decided to screw over everyone and not just the sham contractors and the tax office. It was bound to happen sometime due to the level of trust required in an enterprise that is really about hiding the truth.
If I had to wager though, what happened is that they blew contract renewal with their IT contractor and they are unable to know who they are supposed to pay and what.
FWIW: my guess is the now the previous owners have taken the money and gone, there is nobody left to run the business. New owners have decided its cheaper to go legal on them rather than hire them back as consultants.
Je ne se quoi?
Charon doesn't make change.
But seriously, how are they even ostensibly solvent? Failing at payroll is the lasf thing you do when your ambition is reduced to ”survive untik next week". The money simply isn't there.
No, no they don't, because they don't have eyes. Only living beings can "see", and at a push, a computer with a video camera could be said to "see" something.
More pathetically lazy journalism. Such as "The terrorist attack, which SAW seven people injured", etc. etc. And all because journalist are too stupid and lazy to learn how to write their own language properly!
Hence we now have the ludicrous widespread use of "Nasa" instead of "N.A.S.A." (is it that hard to remember?) and the even worse "Aids", instead of "A.I.D.S.".
Its possible that Plutuspayroll have taken money and are doing a runner, but there is no evidence of this on the website or article. It might be reasonable to believe that they have stopped accepting funds as well as stopped making payment, in which case (I assume) it would be up to the employers to make the payments - and handle the taxes - until the issue is resolved.
the definition of financial solvency means you can pay your bills
They can have the financial liquidity and cash flows required to pay people, and still lack the processes, technology and information required to properly execute those payments.
They're thus solvent, just fucking shit.
Free is actually a nebulous term, I often tell telemarketers I can't afford free. Sometimes free means no out of pocket expense, I suspect that the contracting firms are paying Plutus a processing fee and Plutus is also playing the float; and is just a baby-step away from being a check kiting Ponzi scheme.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Works every time.
I saw something like this happen at/to a large company in the US many years ago. They had a number of engineers in on contract through one particular contracting firm. GD/FW was paying the contracting firm, in full and on schedule, but the engineer paychecks were bouncing. One guy I heard about flew up to the contracting firm's bank's home office, and presented the check in person, so that the bank would have no choice but to tell him why they refused to pay a valid check drawn against them.
It turned out that the owner of the firm had taken the money and ran.
Friends of mine got badly hurt.
It did not help that the guy who ran the office inside the large company that dealt with the various contracting firms absolutely HATED Shoppers, because of his perception that they made a lot more money than the direct employees made for the same work. Nobody had ever explained to him about unpaid time between jobs, or about the realities of living in motels for most of the year and being away from family and friends all that time.
Eventually, with the help of one of the big contracting firms, they set up a new branch of the contracting firm to pick up all the affected Shoppers. I never found out what happened with the missing money.
From the sound of this, the owner(s) of Plutus have quite probably also taken the money and absconded. As it stands right now, it will certainly take serious legal action, from everyone who can bring force to bear, to get any real answers.