Imagine being told by your boss that you’re getting a raise. Sounds great, right?

What would you do if the raise didn’t show up on your next paycheck?

Months later, you still haven’t actually gotten the raise.

Would you ask your boss about it, wait patiently or consider doing something illegal?

In this story, one employee is in this situation, and his boss actually agreed in writing to a plan that is technically illegal. Now, the employee is having second thoughts but isn’t sure how else to get this raise.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITA for putting extra hours on my time sheet at my job because I’ve been told every week for the past eight months that my raise would “be on my next check”?

Okay, so let me start by saying I love my job. It pays pretty well, I work on my own, very good benefits, I work four 12-hour shifts every week with the option for more overtime essentially every week.

My direct boss is the operations manager (OM) for the entire department. He is the only person I have to answer to.

Eight months ago he decided to give me a raise that would be “on my next check”.

This would be very frustrating!

Every two weeks (pay period) he would continually tell me it’s supposed to be on my next check and it never was.

For awhile there I thought maybe he was screwing me around about it being “stuck somewhere in corporate”… until…

Last week when my pay stub was posted my raise still wasn’t there, and I got pretty upset about it.

I calculated that over the last eight months the company owes me about $1800 from when I was told my raise would be there until now.

His boss agreed with his plan.

I told my boss that if he really can’t get this through (with backpay), I’m going to start writing down extra hours on my time sheet until they are back to even with me.

He told me to go ahead and do it (commit fraud) and he would still sign off on my time sheets like nothing happened. He just told me to keep a documented running tally so that he knows when I can stop doing this.

I have all of our texts/emails saved, which is basically us conspiring to defraud a company… but I can’t help but feel like this money is owed to me, because they have been lying to me for 8 months… so what’s the difference if I lie to them?

If I get caught, I’ll still get fired, but at least I have documentation showing that I was TOLD by the OM to do it.

AITA?

Wouldn’t there be an easier way? Can’t they just contact HR or the payroll company or whoever to get the raise to start showing up on the paychecks and to add a bonus payment for backpay?

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who rejects a low contract offer and leaves the company instead.

Let’s see what Reddit suggests.

This person suggests talking to HR.

Here’s a suggestion to talk to the company about the raise.

This person asks a really good question, and the answer to the question is definitely “no.”

Nobody thinks OP should go through with the overtime plan.

What he really needs to find out is why he’s not getting the raise. Where is the glitch? If his company has HR, that’s probably the best place to start.

I get that he’s really frustrated, but it’s not worth doing anything illegal.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an IT department who keeps receiving tickets for a company that was previously spun off.