Accrued Bonus Question

I was wondering if any of you knew what standard policy is with regard to accrued bonuses? I resigned from my position to pursue a more attractive opportunity and my prior employer is refusing to pay me my accrued bonus (3 months worth, I said I would accept the minimum of the range prorated for 3 months - even though I have received excellent performance reviews and was just under the maximum range for my prior year's bonus). Any of you have any thoughts on this? If it's not standard practice to get the bonus, then I won't pursue this further, but that doesn't seem particularly fair (trying to be as objective as possible...I mean what if I had 9 months of accrued bonus?)

Thanks.

8 Comments
 

If they were going to pay you like that they might as well just raise your base salary. Whole point of the bonus is to keep you around for a full year so that they know when people are likely to quit.

Ideally you should have asked your new employer to increase your signing bonus to compensate for the bonus you are forfeiting by coming to work for them right now as opposed to at year end, but it might be too late for that.

 

Interested to hear of other people's experiences.

What about a much more substantial accrued bonus... say 80% of the year is done with.

What is the norm in getting accrued bonus if you leave before bonus time? Does anyone know of people who have done this and either gotten paid accrued bonus or talked to their ex-firm and negotiated something agreeable?

 

On a side note, can you post a link to the article. I believe it was in the New Yorker or something and surprisingly enough it was written in 2002-ish time frame.

The guy, Will, is a complete fucking idiot, btw. The $.5-1M income was his consideration for canceled vacations and flights to the west coast for bullshit meetings. He was a fucking idiot for living on tomorrow's income. There was risk involved, he weighed the risks, and ended up getting burned. Then he's bitching and moaning as if he'd been had.

What a piece of shit.

 

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