Hilarious. Clearly she was totally forgotten and the automated systems continued to pay her. The question I guess is who should have been monitoring payroll.
As far as I know, there's no legal requirement for anyone to have their company deduct taxes / SS from their paychecks. I mean, we all do it, because it's more convenient than to have to track it for yourself (and also keep enough money on-hand to settle up with the government at the end of the year).<p>The standard thing to do would be to fill out a form, in order to have a deduction rate changed, and then another to have it changed back. It sounds like the form anyone else would have filled out would have gone to her, and then she'd have made the change in the payroll system. If she didn't fill out the forms, then what she did was irregular (and maybe worthy of some kind of discipline), but if she was smart enough that she <i>did</i> file the proper forms before she changed her own settings, then I can't see them making a disciplinary charge stick.<p>Even apart from that, so long as she paid the correct amount of taxes at the end of the year, she's not in any legal jeopardy. She didn't steal anything from anyone. I'm kind of cross with TFA for not explaining that clearly.<p>Obviously, yeah. Someone screwed up, <i>badly</i>, to have kept her on leave and on the payroll all this time, but that's not her responsibility.
> of logging into the fire department’s payroll system and altering her Social Security/Medicare FICA deductions in order to increase her biweekly take-home pay by a few hundred dollars.<p>Meanwhile I can do just that and have been able to do that at every company ever. I don’t understand why this is an issue.