Easy Money Gets Hard
Payroll error requires 400 students to return payments
About 400 students who work for Boston University got some discouraging news from the Office of Student Employment last week: they had received a tax rebate that they were not entitled to. The payment, a FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) rebate, was the result of a coding error made by the Office of Student Employment.
Director of Student Employment Mary Ann French, who describes last week as the worst week of her life, discovered the error the day after the checks were issued. French says the amount of the incorrectly paid money was roughly $70,000, or an average of $165 per student. The payments resulted, she says, when students were wrongly identified as having been enrolled in a minimum of six credit hours over both summer terms, the criteria required to be eligible for the rebate. “I’m very sorry,” French says. “But I’m happy to say that most students have been very understanding.
She says the students who received the rebate in error have been given three options for paying it back: they can write a check payable to Boston University, they can pay cash to the Student Payroll Office, or they can have the money deducted from their paychecks over the next several weeks. The Student Payroll Office has asked that those choosing to write a check or pay cash do so by 5 p.m. on Monday, November 6.
Alexandra Oates (CAS 07), who works at Campus Information, is one of the students who was paid in error; she describes the mistake as “kind of sad.”
“The money was unexpected so I went out and splurged on a few things,” she says. For me it’s better to stretch the payment out.” Oates says that at first she was annoyed by the mistake, but after speaking with French, she believes the University is doing everything it can to make the payback painless.
“She was so apologetic and so accommodating,” Oates says. “It was nice to hear. It stinks, but it was a mistake. It happens.”
French says her department is willing to talk to students who think they’ll have difficulty meeting the payback deadline. “If anyone has a problem paying this back,” she says, “we are willing to work with them.”
Students can view the amount of their rebate by logging on to the Employee Link with their user name and Kerberos password and finding the pay stub for the week ending October 22, 2006. The rebate will appear as a negative amount in the “Tax Deductions” section.
Students with questions should call the Student Payroll Office at 617-353-3588 or e-mail stupayro@bu.edu.