Proof in the pudding

Man I am pissed off this morning. I have been doing work for Acme client for almost a year now and have submitted my work every month expecting to be paid for that work. For the most part I have been paid for it although I noticed a couple months ago that my client had missed a couple invoices, at least that is what seems to have happened according to me reconciliation of my invoices and payments.

I sent my reconciliation through and initially didn’t receive a response. When I did receive feedback the information I received didn’t contradict the apparent shortfall. The person who I was liaising with (I’ll call this person “Frank”) was dealing with payroll and came back to me in January with news of some advance I apparently requested in December. This was completely bogus and seems to me to either be a clerical error or a fraud and yet there has been no comeback on that.

I terminated by contract with Acme at the beginning of February, submitted all the work that was due to the end of the month and asked that the shortfalls be reviewed and if my reconciliation is correct, that I be paid, in full, at the end of February. I checked my bank account this morning to find that I haven’t even been paid in full for February, nevermind the arrears.

I haven’t named Acme here because I have seen too many of these sorts of disputes aired on blogs and just poison the air but what do you do when you are dealing with a large company that simply doesn’t respond to anything you do. I could sue the company for the arrears in the Small Claims Court (the amount is so small that this is the appropriate court) but that would take months and enough of my time to make the whole exercise a waste of money in the end. The people who I reported to don’t seem too interested in helping me finalise this issue despite their initial eagerness to work with me. Frank has been hard at work trying to help me but he can’t make the decisions that need to be made so I am basically stuck and it pisses me off. This may be about a relatively small amount of money but that is money I worked for and if it is due, it should be paid.

This is just another example of how important it is to look at how companies treat their employees and contractors at the end of the day. Often these projects start with such promise and over time the companies forget that they are dealing with people who do this work for an income so they can pay bills, pay staff, develop their businesses further. I’d like to characterise the whole company as a collection of so and so’s but I know some of the people working there and I am friends with some of those people and they are great people.

So, I wind up here writing this post about some anonymous company that has stiffed me and gives rocks about it and with no satisfactory end in sight.

Technorati Tags:
stiffed, no pay, unscrupulous companies, pissed off