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Employment Solicitors

What are my rights if my wages have been withheld? (14 March 2012)

Date: 14/03/2012
Duncan Lewis, Employment Solicitors, What are my rights if my wages have been withheld?

Occasionally, problems can arise over the payment of wages at work, and it is worth knowing that only under certain limited circumstances is your employer legally entitled to withhold your wages. This is a general overview of the law governing these matters. For particular information on your own situation, it is recommended that you consult employment solicitors such as Duncan Lewis, who will be able to offer more specialised help and advice.

Under the Employment Rights Act of 1996, you as an employee are entitled to full payment of your wages, which includes holiday entitlements, commissions and bonuses. Some things such as gratuities in connection with benefits in kind, redundancy payments and retirement are not counted as wages, and neither are things like fuel expenses, travel allowances and pensions.

In certain circumstances, an employer is allowed to withhold your wages. Therefore, it is worth knowing what these are before starting an appeal or complaints procedure, because your employer might be perfectly entitled to withhold money. Statutory authorisation is one example of this, where the employer makes deductions for NI payments and income tax. A county court might have ordered your employer to make deductions from your wages in order to pay a fine, through an attachment of earnings order. Alternatively, there might be an order for maintenance payments in place, so your employer is deducting your earnings at source.

There may also be inclusions in your contract of employment that allows your employer to make certain deductions from your pay, or you might have signed an agreement that deductions can be made; the employer cannot make deductions and afterwards ask for your permission to do so.

Some of the more common reasons for legitimately deducting pay include the employer having accidentally overpaid you in salary or expenses and seeking to recoup these funds, or if you have underpaid the Inland Revenue in tax. Industrial or strike action may result in deduction of pay, or to satisfy a third party contractual obligation. A tribunal or court might have ordered you to repay an employer a certain amount, and the employer can then make appropriate deductions from your wages.

Your employer will not have broken the law if the deduction was purely an error, as sometimes happens when computer systems make a mistake and underpay employees; this is completely different from a deliberate decision on the employer’s part to withhold payments from you for whatever reason.

Apart from the above reasons why employers might deduct sums from your salary before you receive it, which may or may not be in breach of contract or the law, they are not entitled to demand money from you.

If you think your employer has illegally or unfairly withheld money from your salary before you received it, the most common recourse is to request an Employment Tribunal, which has the power to force the employer to repay money to you should it find the employer to be at fault in the matter. The claim should be raised with the tribunal within three months of the payment having been made.

Consult Duncan Lewis and other employment solicitors for further information.


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