Boss Wants To Make Therapists Responsible For Outstanding Balances (ga)

Hello all. I’m looking for some guidance for my coworkers and myself. We work as Associate Professional Counselors at a private practice in Georgia, USA. Up until this year, we were 1099 contractors. This year, we are now W2s.

Long story short, our boss/the owner of the practice (an LLC, if that makes any difference) told us she expects us to pay off outstanding balances owed by clients if they are not paid off by the clients either in totality or via payment plan starting March 1st of this year.

What are our legal rights? She is saying she will dock our pay to “contribute” to those outstanding balances if we do not just pay the balances upfront. She is against sending the client to collections since collection agencies typically take 20-50%.

For clarification, the outstanding balances of these clients consist of private pay rates, copays, missed session fees, etc. that built up due to declined cards or the clients ghosting the practice. I was always told by my boss it was my responsibility as the therapist to collect payments from my clients via our EHR system. (The clients upload a card to the EHR that is then charged after sessions.) When cards declined, we were told to send a list to our billing person for her to contact those clients to pay off their balances. I have a paper trail of me asking our billing person multiple times to check in about outstanding balances and declined cards. It was never taken care of, and now I am expected to pay the outstanding balances (about 3k in total—one of which is due to an expired insurance card being submitted by a client and not caught by billing until a year after I started seeing the client).

Any help would be greatly appreciated. If more info is needed on my end, I’ll be happy to answer any questions.