Payroll question
Ask the company if they can make an adjustment for the next paycheck. If they can't then do the following: Increase the number of Federal exemptions by 1. In 2014 a personal exemption reduces your apparent income by $3950.  If you are in the 10 % tax bracket and you are paid every two weeks you will see the amount of taxes withheld drop by ($3950*0.10/26) or ~$15. The 13 Paychecks later change it back. If you are in the 15 % tax bracket and you are paid every two weeks you will see the amount of taxes withheld drop by ($3950*0.15/26) or ~$23. Then 9 Paychecks later change it back If you are in the 25 % tax bracket and you are paid every two weeks you will see the amount of taxes withheld drop by ($3950*0.10/26) or ~$38. Then 5 paychecks later change it back. Remember the money isn't gone, it has just been transferred prematurely to the federal treasury.  You could also wait until you complete your taxes this spring, then see if you needed to make an adjustment to your exemptions. If you normally get a large refund then you should be increasing your exemptions anyway. If you are always writing a check to the IRS then you weren't getting enough withheld. Also make sure that payroll has the correct numbers. Most companies include the number of federal and state exemptions on the paycheck stub, or the pdf of the stub. "That $200 extra that your employer withheld may already have been sent on to the IRS. Depending on the size of the employer, withholdings from payroll taxes (plus employer's share of Social Security and Medicare taxes) might be deposited in the US Treasury within days of being withheld. So, asking the employer to reimburse you, ""out of petty cash"" so to speak, might not work at all.  As JoeTaxpayer says, you could ask that $200 less be withheld as income tax from your pay for the next pay period (is your Federal income tax withholding at least $200 per pay period?), and one way of ""forcing"" the employer to withhold less is to file a  new W-4 form with Human Resources/Payroll, increasing the number of  exemptions to more than you are entitled to, and then filing a new W-4 changing your exemptions back to what they are right now once when you have had $200 less withheld. But be careful. Claims for more exemptions than you are entitled to can be problematic, and the IRS might come looking if you suddenly ""discover"" several extra children for whom you are entitled to claim exemptions."
Yes, you can do what you are contemplating doing, and it works quite well. Just don't get the university's payroll office too riled by going in each June, July, August and September to adjust your payroll withholding! Do it at the end of the summer when perhaps most of your contract income for the year has already been received and you have a fairly good estimate for what your tax bill will be for the coming year. Don't forget to include Social Security and Medicare taxes (both employee's share as well as employer's share) on your contract income in estimating the tax due. The nice thing about paying estimated taxes via payroll deduction is that all that tax money can be counted as having been paid in four equal and timely quarterly payments of estimated tax, regardless of when the money was actually withheld from your university paycheck. You could (if you wanted to, and had a fat salary from the university, heh heh) have all the tax due on your contract income withheld from just your last paycheck of the year! But whether you increase the withholding in August or in December, do remember to change it back after the last paycheck of the year has been received so that next year's withholding starts out at a more mellow pace. "I had the same thing happen to me in late 2010.  I contacted the big company's bored-sounding payroll department - after wading through the phone menu, and more than one ""all of our operators are busy, please call back later <click>"" - and told them I had this extra money.  The guy in India told me that my petition would be investigated and that a ticket would be opened.  I heard nothing for a couple of weeks.  I followed up with payroll.  They said that my petition investigation had determined that I did indeed get paid extra, and they'd be sending me a letter demanding the overpayment. I received no letter, and a month later (January 2011) I got a W-2 with the paycheck included on it.  I decided that I'd spent enough of my own time and effort on it, and if they wanted it back, the ball was in their court.  I changed my bank account numbers to prevent them from auto-debiting my account, and spent the money as if it was mine.   I have not heard anything about it since then. From what I was able to determine, once I'd made a good-faith effort to return it, I was in the clear. And for what it's worth, it's not like you can just ""return"" it.  Among other things: I certainly wasn't just going to mail the company a check and hope for the best." They're understaffed. There's one lady who works in the office and lives onsite. She's the right lady for the job because she is on top of absolutely everything, but she's way overworked. So the company above her probably justifies it that they're not putting in any extra payroll, just overworking the poor lady. One aspect that may not be obvious - if you contribute to an HSA through payroll deduction, it comes out before the Social Security (6.2%) and Medicare (1.45%) taxes.  Since a payroll contribution reduces your taxes by 7.65%, it's generally the better option. WE're talking about companies. Cooperate companies.  What cooperate company is issuing bounced or fake checks to their employees that can also issue debit cards as payments? None.   You're trying to split hairs between personal cashed checks and pay roll checks. They aren't the same at all. Payroll checks don't require a 3 day waiting period before the balance is moved to your account, personal checks that don't have a history of bouncing do. "IANAL, but I had heard (and would appreciate someone more qualified commenting on this) that one reason these things were often found unenforceable is that there is no consideration.  The contract is to bind you for your work each day, but once you stop working, they allege you have a continued obligation that transcends your time at the company.  Claiming that your day-to-day compensation covers this is as if to say some part of that compensation is not for your work but to pay you for not going elsewhere.  It would be nice to see at minimum a requirement to separate these two concepts into separate contracts as bundling them creates a blur, and most importantly doesn't allow you to negotiate or walk away from the terms of one part without the other.  At the heart of any ""market"", which the job market purports to be, is a sense that a fair price is reached when both parties can walk away from a bad deal. This is not so in the case of employment because, as Adlai Stevenson said, ""a hungry man is not a free man"", so someone who needs to eat (or feed a family) has a need to take an offer that is already biasing their acceptance of work, and this quasi-duress is compounded when a company can attach additional pressures that work agains that person's ability to fairly negotiate possible improvements of what may already have been a bad situation.  I'm of the impression that duress itself has been argued to be a reason to hold a contract invalid.  But more abstractly and generally, any time two parties are bargaining asymmetrically (I'm not sure the legal definition, but intuitively I'd say where one party has the ability to force a contract change and the other party is not), then those terms have to be suspect.  Also, for the special case the pay is anything near minimum wage, I would suggest asking the question of whether the part of the compensation that is salary, not ""keeping you from working for the competition"", is the wage paid consistent with minimum wage, or does it have to draw from the pool of money that is not about wage but is about incentivizing you to not move.  And, finally, if they stop paying you, and each day you've been paid a little to work and a little to incentivize you to leave, then are you getting a continued revenue stream to continue to incentivize you not to work for the competition? If not, there would seem again not to be consideration.  As I said, I'm not an expert in this. I just follow such matters sometimes in the news. But I don't see these issues getting discussed here and I hope we'll see some useful responses from the crowd here, and also the smart folks at reddit can help through their discussions to form some useful political and legal defenses to help individuals overcome what is really a moral outrage on this matter.  Capitalism is an often cruel engine.  I worked at a company where one of the bosses said to me, after contributing really great things that added structurally in fundamental ways to the company, ""don't tell me what you've done, tell me what you've done lately"". Capitalism makes people scrap every day to prove their worth. So it's morally an outrage to see it also trying even as it beats down the price of someone and tells them they aren't entitled to better, to tell them that they may not go somewhere else that thinks they are better. That is not competition and it is not fair.    Indentured servitude, not slavery, is more technically correct. And yet it is a push to treat people like capital, so slavery is not inappropriate metaphorically.  The topic is non-competes, but really it's about businesses not wanting to have to compete for employees; that is, about businesses not wanting capitalism to prevail in hiring.  Sorry for the length." "Anything is negotiable.  Clearly in the current draft of the contract the company isn't going to calculate or withhold taxes on your behalf - that is your responsibility. But if you want to calculate taxes yourself, and break out the fees you are receiving into several ""buckets"" on the invoice, the company might agree (they might have to run it past their legal department first). I don't see how that helps anything - it just divides the single fee into two pieces with the same overall total. As @mhoran_psprep points out, it appears that the company expects you to cover your expenses from within your charges. Thus, it's up to you to decide the appropriate fees to charge, and you are assuming the risk that you have estimated your expenses incorrectly. If you want the company to pay you a fee, plus reimburse your expenses, you will need to craft that into the contract. It's not clear what kind of expenses you need to be covered, and sometimes companies will not agree to them. For specific tax rule questions applicable to your locale, you should consult your tax adviser." "When you say ""set aside,"" you mean you saved to pay the tax due in April? That's underpaying. It's a rare exception the IRS makes for this penalty, hopefully it wasn't too large, and you now know how much to withhold through payroll deductions.  Problem is, this wasn't unusual, it was an oversight. You have no legitimate grounds to dispute. Sorry."