CLIFTON PARK — The abrupt closure this week of a Clifton Park-based payroll company has left other businesses and their employees scrambling after direct deposits stopped and some payments were pulled back.
The payroll company, MyPayrollHR, had apparently shuttered its offices at 855 Route 146 as of Friday morning, and notified clients in an email Thursday that they would no longer be able to process payroll payments. Calls to the company were not answered Thursday or Friday.
Some payments that had been credited to the employees of companies using MyPayrollHR were reversed late this week, dropping some accounts into a negative balance.
“Right now effectively I have not been paid for the last two weeks of being employed and that’s a substantial cut,” said Rich Matthews, executive chef at The Shop, a restaurant in Troy.
Matthews said all of The Shop’s nearly 30 employees were impacted by the payroll problems, with some now carrying negative balances on accounts used for their direct deposits. He said it’s a particularly tough time of the month for people to deal with the financial problems because of rent payments and other costs that come at the start of the month.
“Everyone is just trying to scramble,” he said.
Matthews said The Shop uses Dalle, a Watervliet-based accounting-services firm, to help manage a handful of financial transactions; that company subcontracted the payroll services out to MyPayrollHR, he said. Matthews said Dalle informed him that MyPayrollHR’s assets had been seized by Pioneer Bank over the past week due to a pending investigation.
The effects of MyPayrollHR’s financial seizure appeared to cascade across the country on Thursday and Friday, as employees and business owners from as far away as Texas joined a Facebook group set up for people impacted by the closure. The Facebook group, called Victims of MyPayroll HR, quickly became a clearinghouse of advice for those impacted by the payroll problems. People purporting to be clients of the payroll company also posted that they were abruptly terminated this week and also struggling with payment problems.
The problems had been reported to both state and federal law enforcement agencies by Friday afternoon, according to multiple posts on Facebook.
Investigation of the situation apparently will fall to the state Department of Financial Services — Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Friday urged anyone affected by the shutdown to file a complaint with DFS by calling (800) 342-3736 (8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays) or online at www.dfs.ny.gov/complaint.
“The sudden and unexplained shutdown of MyPayrollHR in Clifton Park is disturbing and completely unacceptable,” he said in a news release. “Its reckless actions have left employees across the state and the nation with negative bank accounts and forced businesses who depend on its payroll services to scramble to find ways to compensate their employees.
“These businesses and workers deserve answers, and I am calling on the Department of Financial Services to investigate this irresponsible company’s actions. This is not how we do business in New York, and we will not allow these bad actors to take money away from the hard-working people in this state.”
Categories: -News-, Saratoga County, Schenectady County, Your Niskayuna
