Two stories hit the TV news headlines this week involving hundreds of state workers being ordered to pay back parts of their salaries going back years.
In the case of state employees at IMT (the driving licensing authority) refunds demanded by the government mean workers are being asked to repay an average of €9,300 each.
Against a cavalcade of outrage, with unions describing the situation as “an authentic theft”, university professor and labour law expert Luís Gonçalves da Silva said on radio TSF that the demands were essentially illegal, as workers are not “obliged to know whether or not their employer is or is not complying with the law”.
In other words, if IMT overpaid its staff, it is up to the government to get the money off IMT, not the individual workers – many of which have since retired.
A similar scenario is playing out at CTT (the post office) where tax authorities are calling on “various hundreds of workers” to return payments relating to length of service and received apparently incorrectly since March 2012.
