Hr Miscalculated Pto, Put Most People At A Negative Balance, And Are Having Us Work Unpaid Overtime To “pay It Back”

Hey everyone! This is in Texas, US, and I know that this is a pretty specific situation, so if anyone from my company sees this- hi, I guess.

Recently, we were told that the way the PTO system was set up was done incorrectly and it hasn’t been subtracting used vacation time. Their solution to this was to remove ANY used pto from the balance, causing just about everyone to go into the negative. For salaried employees though, it sounds like they just set them to Zero hours as opposed to letting them go negative. They gave those of us in the negative two options: wait for the pto to naturally build back up or work extra hours unpaid that would be put against their negative hours. For example, if I was nevative 32 hours, I could work an extra two off the clock and after reporting that I’d be at 30, not including any amount I’d naturally accrue.

HR knew about this problem for a few months and chose to wait to tell us until early February- the big problem for some of us being that they let us continue to take out PTO over the winter holidays, causing some to go SIGNIFICANTLY lower than they would’ve been had they told us to stop when they found out. I assumed that in all that time they took, they discussed this with a lawyer, but in the (admittedly basic) research my coworkers and I have done, we aren’t sure if this solution is legal. Specifically, is it legal that they’re having us work unpaid in order to “pay off” our negative balances? I understand that its “already been paid”, but we are working to not RECEIVE anything. The bigger question is if anyone were to leave the company with a negative balance- either by quitting or being fired- do they have the right to take any negative balance out of your paycheck?