Direct Deposit Change Notice: Fill & Download for Free

Sorry for going anonymous on thus one - it's one of those “to protect the guilty” situations.At the company I used to work for, on and off for six years, the boss was really big on direct deposit. He pushed everyone onto direct deposit with lots of great reasons.“If I'm traveling when payroll comes out, there won't be anyone around to sign checks. You'll have to wait until I get back to get paid.” “Direct deposit hits your bank account at midnight on the morning of pay day, so you'll get your money faster than if I sign the check that afternoon.” He had a great sales pitch to make sure everyone was set up on direct deposit.I was on direct deposit for years, but at some point I changed banks and just never got around to submitting the info for my new account.But here's the thing. Direct deposit can work both ways.An employee had stolen from the company, so the boss had the HR manager pull the last two checks out of the guy's account - a month's worth of pay. I thought that was a bit harsh, but hey, that employee was a crook and got what he deserved.Then one of the girls in data entry had a family emergency. She had to quit her job with no notice and move back East to take care of her mom. “Well, she didn't give proper notice…”, so he ordered HR to pull out her last check.I thought that was a pretty crappy move - and so did the HR manager - so she refused to do it. The boss fired her and, you guessed it, pulled a month's worth of pay back out of her account.Needless to say, there was no way in hell I was going on direct deposit after that. I was running a business on the side, and had plans of my own to leave the company eventually.Every now and then the boss would stop by my office “hey, I noticed you hadn't gotten back on direct deposit yet… …you know the money hits your account a lot earlier… “I made up excuses, changed the subject, avoided eye contact… …he was on to me.I had been up front with my employer, that I was running a small business in my free time. They said they were fine with it, but I knew it was a bit of a gamble.So the day finally came. I was told by my boss “you can do this, or you can do that, but you can't do both.” I was fired! It was my turn!About a week later I get a call from the manager at my old bank branch. “I just got the strangest call, someone tried to reverse a direct deposit from over a year ago…”Sure enough, my old boss had gone all the way back to my last direct deposit - into an account that was long closed - and tried to take back my money.I don't know if I was lucky or smart, but he was basically just using the reverse direct deposits to “get even” with people he didn't like. He had no legal basis for taking the money, since it was paid two weeks after it was earned. But he knew the havoc he'd cause by making the account go negative, and was banking on the fact that the (now broke) former employee wouldn't be able to hire a lawyer to get the money back.

I draw disability, and so does my mother. Her check gets deposited into her bank’s debit account, and ONLY on the third of the month, unless of course the third falls on a weekend or holiday so she gets a bit sooner in that case.On the other hand, I drew my direct deposited onto my Wal-Mart money card and it would ALWAYS be available as many as three days early. Now I recently changed it so my disability goes into MY real bank account, and it ONLY gets deposited on the 3rd now.I’ve often noticed that Wal-Mart Money Card advertises “receive your direct deposit up to 3 days sooner!” and it my experience… it sure does. While it’s unfortunately that they charge $3/month to use the WMMC, sometimes getting paid those 3 days sooner would really be great and well worth the service charge.So to summarize, when my direct deposits went to WMMC, they always got there earlier, usually as many as 3 days sooner. In regards to a disability payment, I can see how Wal-Mart can verify the check is coming and thus “fronts’ me the money and probably they can do the same when it comes to employees at Wal-Mart. However I don’t see how they’d know the deposits are forthcoming from other employers, but I do notice that they say “receive your pay UP TO THREE DAYS quicker” so probably if they don’t have a way to verify the payment is coming they just wait until the actual deposit goes through.

Since I’m salaried and have my paychecks directly deposited into the same bank account that my wife has her salaried paychecks directly deposited into, it would probably take me a long time to realize that this happened. I don’t often look at my checks because they are always the same amount. And, because they are always the same amount, I don’t often look at our bank account balance; we know what gets put in there and how much we can spend in a month.My wife and I also try to play the market a little bit. We’ll sell a few thousand dollars when the market is high and then put it back in when the market is low again. So, our bank account balances vary from time to time.The way I would probably notice would be that some number of months later, I’d be surprised by how much money was in our account. I’d probably assume that we’d been doing a very good job at under-spending.Maybe I’d be curious enough to spend the my limited free-time figuring out how exactly our balance got so high, but even if I did, I’d probably focus on our spending. I’d maybe make a spreadsheet to see how our spending has changed over the past few months.I may eventually find the one deposit that was too high. But, that would be after a lot of work that I was not obligated to do. That’s hours of work that I did to satisfy my own curiosity only to find a mistake that was not my fault.I’d probably rationalize it as: if my employer wanted to find where the missing money went, they could put in the same amount of work I did to find it. If it wasn’t that important to them to set thing right, then it doesn’t need to be a priority for me, either.