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Antiwork

Statute of limitations on reporting tip theft, is this situation worth it?

I've been reading posts here that have been making me reflect on issues that happened back when I was working in bars/restaurants, that seemed like normal shit at the time but now I realized are messed up or even illegal. Specifically, there's a bar I used to work at in Texas back in 2010 that accidentally kept a share of cash tips from the servers and never returned them. This wasn't malicious, there was an issue with POS checkouts miscalculating what we were supposed to turn in as cash at the end of a shift, and for some reason it was including a percentage of estimated cash tips but reporting it as closed out cash checks. Whatever the checkout said we had closed out as cash was the amount we had to turn in. This went on for a few months, was eventually discovered, and the bar immediately adjusted to…


I've been reading posts here that have been making me reflect on issues that happened back when I was working in bars/restaurants, that seemed like normal shit at the time but now I realized are messed up or even illegal. Specifically, there's a bar I used to work at in Texas back in 2010 that accidentally kept a share of cash tips from the servers and never returned them. This wasn't malicious, there was an issue with POS checkouts miscalculating what we were supposed to turn in as cash at the end of a shift, and for some reason it was including a percentage of estimated cash tips but reporting it as closed out cash checks. Whatever the checkout said we had closed out as cash was the amount we had to turn in. This went on for a few months, was eventually discovered, and the bar immediately adjusted to fix it, even getting a completely different POS system because of it. The issue is that the bar never took the step to figure out how much in tips had been collected while the issue was ongoing, and return them to the servers.

To figure it out you had to manually add up every day's cash closeouts and see the difference from the reported daily total. This would've taken a lot of work, and the bar responded saying we were free to dig up our old checkouts from storage to figure out the totals ourselves but they weren't going to do it for us. I personally managed to get through a few weeks of checkouts and get some money back, but life gets busy and I left that place soon after so I never resolved all of it. To my knowledge no other server ever took the time to go through their checkouts and get the money back.

This was ten+ years ago, the bar location is no longer there though the LLC is still in business. I have zero documentation to prove any of this. I doubt the LLC still had those checkouts. I don't really need the money or anything, it's just the more I think about it the more it doesn't sit well with me. Is this worth trying to report anywhere at all?

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