As the title says, the company I work for, who is going to be my former employer as of today; is telling me that I have to pay back 52 hours of PTO time I used for my vacation earlier this year.Essentially, the company allows you to use a set amount of PTO a year, for me its about 152 hours. This would be considered a loan in my book because you only accrue PTO hours the more you work during the year. So with a base 40 hours a week, you accumulate roughly 50 minutes to an hour of PTO time a day throughout the year. Which means that at this point, I have only “earned” 50 or so hours of PTO and I have used 102 hours of PTO, so I owe my company 52 hours of PTO back. Which means they are telling me that I have to pay back around $890 dollars. The beginning of the fiscal year was may 1st and that is the time frame I'm basing my very rudimentary math on how much I've earned.
My question is, is there any legal recourse to not have to pay this back? I literally have no money in my savings that isn't reserved for other means (mortgage, credit card debt, groceries, gas, etc.) I would LOVE to be able to say that I don't have to pay it back, and that they owe me the rest of my PTO, but I doubt that is possible….
This information would also help a friend that also quit at roughly the same time that was told they owe about $1,700 dollars to the company…
Thank you in advance for any information.
Edit: I live in Ohio, so those are the laws that pertain to this issue.