Atlanta janitor was overpaid $620,000 — now the transit authority is suing for the missing funds. Will the worker have to pay it back?

“I really never heard of [a payroll error] that had that much money involved in it,” said Charles Bridgers, an attorney who specializes in employment law, to Atlanta News First.

$620,000 is a huge amount of money, no matter if you’re a janitor or a government body. It makes sense that both parties would be prepared to fight over it in court.

But which party is most likely to win? And what should you do if your employer overpays you?

Yes, you do have to give wage overpayments back

Unfortunately for the janitor, the law is not on their side. If your employer mistakenly overpays you, you have to give the money back, even though you didn’t do anything wrong. In all likelihood, the (now former) government worker will almost certainly have to give back the $620,000.

“We get calls like this fairly regularly,” said employment attorney Andrew Coffman to WSB-TV 2. “If someone receives an overpayment like that, they have to return it.”

If the janitor decides to fight this in court, they could very well find themselves paying both the $620,000 and any lawyer’s fees they incur in the process.

What happens next depends on where you live. The Fair Labor Standards Act allows companies to garnish your wages to get the funds back, even if that puts you under minimum wage. But some states, such as California, have laws that prevent employers from going that far.

Since the janitor is no longer working for the company, wage garnishment is no longer an option. That makes MARTA’s position difficult, even though they’ll likely win the case.

MARTA could choose to go through collections to get the money back. But if the employee has already spent the money and does not possess assets (like a house) worth an equivalent amount, it could have a tough time actually collecting.

What to do if you think you think your employer overpaid you

You’re almost certainly not going to get an overpayment of hundreds of thousands of dollars with your next paycheck. But it’s still very possible you could be overpaid by a smaller, harder to spot sum.