COMP NEWS – St. Charles Health System spent weeks fixing timecard issues that led to its employees being underpaid. Now, St. Charles has reversed its position and claims that it overpaid its workers – and is now asking those workers to return $2 million in wages.
Employees of St. Charles Health System are being asked to repay roughly $2 million after a ransomware attack on a global workforce management provider kept health system staff from accessing time card data for months.
In December, an attack on Ultimate Kronos Group, a company that holds timekeeping and scheduling data for workplaces nationwide, prevented St. Charles Health System from accessing employee time card data from Nov. 28 to Jan. 22.
After spending weeks repaying regional healthcare staff who had been underpaid, St. Charles is now asking for money back from 2,358 staffers who were overpaid, St. Charles spokeswoman Lisa Goodman said in an email to The Bulletin on Friday.
That’s an average of about $780 per person, Goodman said.
The wage repayment request has angered employees, with some being confronted with over $3,000 in payment requests. The Oregon Nurses Association has told its union members to withhold making repayments until St. Charles’ request is legally vetted.
The move by St. Charles has sparked immediate outrage and pushback from health care staffers who say they are being asked to make thousands of dollars worth of repayments with little clarity as to how the health system decided what they should pay.
“I think there’s a right way of going about getting this fixed, and I don’t know if making our employees responsible for it is the right way to go about it,” said Josh Plank, a hospitalist with St. Charles who is part of the organizing committee for the providers union. He added: “They clearly have enough money to pay a multi-million dollar law firm to fight our union representation, so I don’t think they’re in that bad of a financial situation.”
The Oregon Nurses Association on Thursday told its members not to make the repayments for now. The union’s general counsel wrote a cease and desist order for the health system and planned to send it Friday, urging it to halt the repayment process and claiming that what it was doing was illegal.
To read more about St. Charles’ overpayment problems, click here.
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