Business etiquette and integrity Part II

oldfort
Wed, 20 Apr 2011 21:55:57 +0000

anothermom2 - thank-you very much for your very professional opinion on this matter ( I just got a freebie from a lawyer).

The offer was done in the US and she is still considered as an employee of US, so I think the US law would govern.

Additional information…the reason I kept on referring to it as a worksheet is because it is not something we would normally show to an employee. It is used more for management to figure out how much an expat would cost (someone with 5 kids would be a lot more expensive than someone with one kid). The worksheet is not normally checked carefully because it is meant to be an estimate.

Myself and other expats never saw our worksheet. We are given an offering letter, which this employee also received. In the letter, it states the base salary, and each benefit we would receive during the secondment, but not the dollar amount. As an example, the company would pay for travel in accordance with our global secondment policy, the company would pay for school tuition. The reason we don’t put down exact dollar amount is because all of those costs could vary. The problem we have here is this employee’s HR showed her the worksheet.

I spoke with legal and HR today. Our legal said even if it (worksheet) is a contract, it does allow for typo, especially when it is so obvious (10 times of normal amount). It is further supported by how much we pay other expats in the similar situation as this employee, and the amount is calculated according to policy.

HR advised me not to pay in order to adhere to policy. The amount could be easily made up at bonus time because it is a small percentage of employee’s total compensation. If the employee would quit over this then she is being short sighted.

I am trying to see if we could offer her something else in lieu of paying her this amount.