Software titan reverses position after overpaying some staff during recent layoffs
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 February 2009 02.20 GMT
- Article history
Technology giant Microsoft has been forced to make an embarrassing climb-down after it asked some former employees to return part of their redundancy payments.
In what the company has described as an "administrative error", a handful of workers were given around $5,000 (£3,450) more than the severance pay they were entitled to after being made redundant last month.
Despite the fact that the company initially requested that they return the extra cash, however, it has now said they can keep the money after a storm of protest online.
In a statement, Microsoft said that it had mishandled the affair and would no longer be chasing repayment.
"Last week, 25 former Microsoft employees were informed that they were overpaid as a part of their severance payments from the company," it said.
"This was a mistake on our part. We should have handled this situation in a more thoughtful manner. We are reaching out to those impacted to relay that we will not seek any payment from those individuals."
The gaffe came after 1,400 workers were given their marching orders in January – the first major job cuts in Microsoft's long history, and part of the software titan's plan to reduce its staffing levels by 5,000 posts next year. Most employees affected were given a 12-week severance package as part of the deal.
However, news that the company was asking for the excess cash to be returned spread across the internet last weekend, after one letter demanding repayment was published online.
According to those documents, the letters claimed that an "inadvertent administrative error occurred that resulted in an overpayment," and asked for repayment to be made within 14 days.
Response to the news was varied, but some criticised Microsoft for being hard-hearted during a time of financial hardship for those affected.
"Are you kidding me?" wrote one commenter on the blog Techcrunch, where the news first erupted. "Screw you… what goes around comes around."
One Seattle employment lawyer even suggested that Microsoft might not have been legally able to demand the money back if the error was not immediately obvious to laid-off workers.
"It may depend on whether or not it was obvious that there was an error," Jill Pugh told ComputerWorld. "A lot of the people laid off were salaried employees, who often don't know exactly what they make in a week minus taxes."
In the end, though, Microsoft executives decided that swallowing the $125,000 slip-up would be easier than suffering from bad public relations.
"I don't think it's worthy of us asking them to make that payment back to us," Microsoft senior vice president Lisa Brummell told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
StumbleUpon is a browser based social media community. I use “browser-based” in the absence of a better term. Although SU has a site where interaction between members is possible, the StumbleUpon Toolbar is the lifeblood of the network – it helps you browse the SU bookmarks, search, send messages to your SU friends, vote for web pages and much more. The toolbar is 
Social sharing buttons and widgets are great: they help your visitors to submit your stories fast to the social and bookmarking sites of their choice. But did you know that onsite SU buttons could be detrimental? They are detrimental for the site they are published on, and they are also detrimental for the unsuspecting SU users who click on them. Why You ask?
Love it or loathe it, everybody who’s anybody is on