MY TURN-If you are a current or retired employee of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) there is yet another assault you might find yourself being subjected to- the clearly false allegation that you were overpaid by LAUSD. The reality is, however, that there is a greater likelihood … and in many cases clear and convincing evidence … that you were significantly underpaid.
In the last few years, LAUSD has been going after thousands of teachers for these alleged overpayments without any evidence to substantiate that this ever took place and for the sole motive of lessening its bottom line at any cost.
If LAUSD had any real interest in determining the truth, all it would have to do is take your gross salary from any year's December salary stub and compare it with where you are supposed to be on the LAUSD salary scale to see whether you were either under or overpaid.
Rather than do this LAUSD has turned over these false overpayment claims to a collection agency, even though such action is clearly illegal.
Worse yet, teachers who have already been targeted for removal from the district on other trumped up charges have found themselves significantly more likely to have LAUSD come after them for these bogus overpayment charges.
What is making this possible is the LAUSD payroll revision disaster of several years ago with all of it's yet unsettled payroll errors that contrary to claims in the L.A. Times has not come to an end. On the contrary, this payroll revision disaster can now make lemonade out of the lemon that it continues to be by obfuscating under supposed LAUSD claims of "annualization" under which "justification" it claims that teachers were overpaid, when in fact they were not.
Here’s how it works when the LAUSD sends a collection agency after a teacher for alleged overpayment. The teacher receives a letter from the district noting that LAUSD has discovered overpayments to that teacher’s salary and the overpayment needs to be paid back." The paper work quotes a specific sum and the letter includes pay stub to supposedly "verify" it.
The stub only reports a gross of the final salary and does not spell out the sum the teacher was supposedly overpaid. Neither does it include a coherent explanation as to how the district arrived at the figures from the information which was provided to the teacher.
Before any prior contact or substantiation of the claim with the teacher, the collection has already been assigned to Valer Enterprises,Inc. out of Holbrook NY.
"Valer Enterprises Inc. is not accredited with the Better Business Bureau" and Valer Enterprises has apparently become so abusive and flagrant in their collection practices that the law firm, Frederich Schulman & Associates, also out of NY, devotes a significant part of their practice to addressing violations on the part of Valer Enterprises.
You can contact Schulman for further information. They may represent you free of charge.
When one of the teachers was contacted by Valer, he replied to them. He indicated to them that it's illegal to attempt to collect on a debt without showing adequate evidence of it. But he also pointed out that Valer Enterprises was well past the statute of limitations for attempting to collect on an alleged overpayment as claimed in their letter dated January 24, 2014. In fact, the section from the contract negotiated between LAUSD and the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) clearly states:
"30.0 Payroll Errors - Limitations Upon Recovery: Any payroll or other salary errors claimed by an employee against the District in a timely manner as provided in the grievance procedure of Article V, shall be corrected retroactively up to a maximum of three years from the date of claim. In the event of an error in favor of an employee, the District shall be limited in its retroactive recovery against the employee to a three-year period dating from the discovery of the error."
So on February 3rd, the teacher informed Valer Enterprises that he didn't intend to pay them anything without a full explanation. He then heard nothing back from Valer Enterprises until April 7th. They left a message to contact them, which he did on April 9th. It was as if their representative never saw or read the reply the teacher had sent to them. This led to a rather unpleasant ending of the conversation, when the teacher told Valer's representative that he planned to lawyer up.
One can rest assured of two things in LAUSD's continuous war against teachers: that war is motivated by the district's sole concern of lessening its overhead- no matter what the cost to quality public education, teachers, and students and that that war will continue unabated until those targeted take appropriate legal action.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 32
Pub: Apr 18, 2014
