Job Quitting Tips: Download Pay Statements
Neufeld Legal P.C. can be reached by telephone at 403-400-4092 / 905-616-8864 or email Chris@NeufeldLegal.com
I cannot over-emphasize the importance of downloading all your employee pay statements while you are still employed with your employer, given their potential significance in the immediate to near future. This is particularly important when you are contemplating quitting or otherwise resigning your job, as immediately after you inform your former boss, they will most likely cut you off from all access and will make it difficult to obtain documentation that you left behind and could reveal serious issues with your former boss' payroll system.
Based on our own research and legal analysis of publicly-available information, employees working in Canada, and especially those working in Alberta, are subject to payroll practices that are all too often not in conformity with the appropriate employment standards legislation. As such, we have deduced substantial concerns impacting those employees, such that a critical resource for employees, as well as myself in employee litigation actions, are employee pay statements.
Nevertheless, most payroll technology requires an employee to login to the payroll site to access and view their pay statements, also known as their pay stubs. The employee’s pay statements are typically not separately emailed or otherwise provided in digital or hard copy format to the employee during the course of their employment or when their job comes to an end.
And while fired and terminated employees are oftentimes provided with written notice that they have a limited time span within which to access the payroll site and retrieve any personal employment information from the payroll site, such as employee pay stubs; this isn’t necessarily communicated when an employee quits or resigns their job.
Furthermore, when employees unilaterally quit or resign their employment, employers most often cut them off immediately from all employment-related systems, which can include the payroll site. Given this reality, it is advantageous to download all your employee pay statements in advance of quitting or resigning your job, together with all other employment-related materials that were specifically provided to you for your personal retention.
Because when you quit your job, getting those pay stubs from your former employer can be made unnecessarily difficult and frustrating, especially where your former boss gets suspicious about your motivations, which can be emotionally stressful for yourself. As such, it makes a lot of sense to download all your pay statements in advance of quitting your job, as its almost always preferable to retrieve your pay stubs without needing the intervention of your former employer, as those pay stubs may or may not contain information of legal value.
And, as we’ve come to learn, many Canadian employees, especially employees in Alberta, are owed earned money when they quit or resign their employment, and the amounts can be quite significant .
Our approach, however, is not for everyone. When we take on an employment case, we pursue it very aggressively, such that we don't pull our punches with your former employer. As such, for those individuals who simply want to move on, even if it means leaving behind a considerable amount of money, we are probably not the right legal team. For everyone else, especially those who were employed by larger companies (who think they are so strong and powerful to be beyond reproach), that meet our internal criteria for aggressive employment litigation, we have a unique legal approach that you should seriously consider. If this is of interest to yourself, feel free to contact our law firm in strict confidence, by telephone at 403-400-4092 or 905-616-8864, or via email at Chris@NeufeldLegal.com.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This website is designed for general informational purposes. The site is not designed to answer specific questions about your individual situation or entitlement. Do not rely upon the information provided on this website as legal advice in respect of your individual situation nor use it as substitute for individual legal advice. If you want specific legal advice, you need to engage a lawyer under established legal engagement procedures that have been specifically agreed to by that lawyer.