My Pay was Zero Today

If you knew you were being overpaid, then you should have set that money aside so it was ready for payback and there was no impact to you.  So your "zero pay" should be a problem.  I'm not sure why you expect a payment plan.

She may not have known she was overpaid until it was too late to have set the money aside to payback ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

I just recently discovered that my new company made a mistake and never started deducting my healthcare premiums. I didn't notice because I expected my premiums to start being deducted at the same time as my 401(k) contributions. As expected, my net pay went down. It just should have gone down more. No one discovered the issue for six months. I don't have to pay it back because it was their error. 

Anyway, there are definitely circumstances where she just may not have been aware, not trying to take advantage. 

I'm sorry, that sounds like a real hassle and stressful situation.

Sorry but no one will ever convince me that they didn't know they were being over/under paid and it was someone else's fault.  If you (general you) are not looking at your paystub that's your fault.  It's really not that hard to validate...it may be time consuming but it's your pay so it's worth it.

If someone was underpaid, they'd surly expect a lump sum payment so if they are overpaid they should expect a lump sum chargeback.

Don't let the brutalizing scare you off.

Wow, that really is a shit show of a problem. I'm sorry you got caught in it. Even if you had realized it happened, I still wouldn't expect a claw back that would leave me with a zero balance check. Glad your manager is jumping on this.

This is terrible. If they made a mistake it was their mistake. I can't imagine my employer making this kind of screw up and then thinking they were going to take it back in one chunk. Jeremy had this issue with his employer when he first started his job. They not only pay a base rate but then commission on sales and the rates are all different based on the number of years you've been with the company and your performance reviews. His paycheck is so hard to determine if they are paying him correctly because of how they figure this. Well as it turns out they paid him a higher commission rate than he was supposed to get and by the time they had noticed it, he had been overpaid by $3k. They deducted $75 a week until it was all paid back. That's how you handle something like this.

Well you would be wrong in a lot of cases.  I couldn’t tell you if there was an error in my pay and certainly not one that went back years.  

I am sorry wallyagain!  Totally stinks.  My previous employer had something similar happen and it affected more than just a few people.  They ended up doing it in incriminates or payments over time.

Good luck.  I hope you can get some relief.

I had that happen once when I worked for American Express. When I went from hourly to salaried. I still keep entering my hours in the tool we used. No one told me to stop and I was young and didn’t know better. The gal who then submitted my pay entered it as overtime. It was a couple pay cycles and about $2K before I noticed and then I alerted them. I was so fortunate they just said to keep it. Just one of the many reasons why I continued working for them for 20 years.

Well, I totally disagree that only the employee has responsibility to verify their pay is accurate. The company is also responsible for payment being correct. 

And also, it's generally true that companies (or governments in this case) have considerably more assets that a typical employee, and I don't think it's unreasonable *at all* that if a company can't be bothered to process payroll correctly - either to the detriment or benefit of the employees - that they should more the more inconvenienced party in correcting it. So yes, they should lump sum pay if they underpaid an employee or set up repayment plans over time if they overpaid an employee. 

Phoenix pay system
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The Phoenix pay system is a payroll processing system for Canadian federal government employees, provided by IBM in June 2011 using PeopleSoft software, and run by Public Services and Procurement Canada. The Public Service Pay Centre is located in Miramichi, New Brunswick. It was first introduced in 2009 as part of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Transformation of Pay Administration Initiative, intended to replace Canada's 40-year old system with a new, cost-saving "automated, off-the-shelf commercial system." By July 2018, Phoenix has caused pay problems to close to 80 percent of the federal government's 290,000 public servants through underpayments, over-payments, and non-payments.[1] The Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, chaired by Senator Percy Mockler, investigated the Phoenix Pay system and submitted their report, "The Phoenix Pay Problem: Working Towards a Solution" on July 31, 2018, in which they called Phoenix a failure and an "international embarrassment".[1] Instead of saving $70 million a year as planned, the report said that the cost to taxpayers to fix Phoenix's problems could reach a total of $2.2 billion by 2023.

You should try to look at my husband's paycheck stub.. I don't even try. He is a truck driver and gets paid by the mile. BUT there are a lot of 'what if's' that go into that.

If his truck is broken down, that is another kind of pay.
If he is stuck in a storm and the highway is closed that is another pay.
If he is sitting and waiting for a delivery more that xxx amount of hours, that is once again another rate of pay.
IF his truck is broken down and needs to be towed and he has to be back to homebase, that is another whole ball of wax.
Oh if he is on home time, no pay. There is no vacation time or sick time. He gets a quarterly 'bonus' instead.

I don't even pretend how to figure his check out.

I'm amazed there's not a class action lawsuit here.

I'm sorry for what you're going through here - that's incredibly stressful.