Employer terminated a team. The immediate pay period following the end of the termination paid out 80 hours to each employee. Eventually they admit it was a mistake with the payroll system being down and the bandaid solution was to simply pay all employees what they’d made the pay period before (so this was the last pay period worked by employees) which meant the terminated employees were paid for hours they didn’t actually work, they had just copied the data from the previous pay period for the sake of getting everybody paid on time.
Months later, debt collectors are contacting the employees to collect on these funds if their initial communication went unanswered/unreturned. Telling it as it was told to me. Is this legal? I’m just trying to understand.