HR advice - do I have a case here?

[Tulips78]

My manager has told me that because my annual leave was inputted wrong into the electronic roster system for financial year 2022 - 2023 (she wont tell me by who but I think it's the manager before her) I now owe a significant amount of hours which will either be made up by me working over time or losing annual leave from the next financial year. I want to fight this, it wasn't my error. Do I have a leg to stand on?

Do you not enter your annual leave yourself, or keep a tally of it somehow? Surely you would have noticed it wasn't adding up correctly? Usually if there is an HR system behind the scenes it's there more of a general management thing so they know who is owed what.
Are you PAYE or self employed? Just thinking if the latter it will be different and holiday time and pay will be much more inter-related?

pretty sure you would have noticed if you had a week or two more holidays than everyone else!! proof is needed from them for you to see and verify

You mention hours so I assume you are not full time )as then it would be obvious that your contract says 20 days plus bank holidays and you got say 25 plus bh.

So the answer works depend on how they told you your holiday, whether it would be obvious it was wrong.

If part time I'd expect people to double check how calculated each year so they know it's right (particularly as bank holidays confuse things)

I think you need to take some responsibility here for knowing your own entitlement and knowing that you'd taken more holiday than you should.

There's probably a case for some compromise about how the time is paid back - you could perhaps ask for it to be considered over a longer time period or to make some up WFH. How many hours are you talking about?

Did you take extra leave that you weren't entitled to? If so, it is reasonable that you make it up, and it's also reasonable that you are aware of how much leave you've taken and what your allowance is.

Best you can hope for is that you make it up over multiple years if it would if cause you significant difficulties or to fall below the legal minimum of 28 days incl BH (pro rata if you don't work full time).

How many hours do you owe? Can you make it up by working extra hours instead of losing leave? Eg work X extra hours/week over your normal hours until it balances out.

I think it depends on the specifics.

If your contract says you're entitled to 25 days and you've taken 30 because the system let you then you've not really got a leg to stand on. Its a bit far fetched to make out that you didn't know you'd taken too much leave.

If your contract is more ambiguous because you're part time or whatever and they told you the wrong amount then that'd be more likely to go in your favour I'd think.

I'm part time and my hours changed twice in one financial year so they calculated it wrong. On my team we do a variety of different hours so it's not really easy to compare how much annual leave we have.

@Tulips78 are you by chance a civil servant ?

@Tulips78 if HR calculated it wrong, but you questioned it and they still confirmed it was correct (even though it was wrong), then you have a case. However, if it was wrong and you just accepted their calculations, then you might be able to come to some agreement with them eg you pay half back/work off half the time you took.