MANILA, Philippines – Businesses that use the services of payroll solutions company Salarium and its app SALPay can’t pay their employees after the company froze their disbursement feature over a supposed tech glitch and disparities in its systems.

A mid-sized engineering company told Rappler that Salarium has held hostage funds amounting to “millions,” resulting in employees unable to receive their salaries for the August 15 cutoff. 

The company has already suffered from some resignations of “highly technical” staff due to the matter. Employees who opted to stay took out salary loans.

A human resource (HR) personnel of the engineering company told Rappler that they have resorted to manually giving cash to employees since SALPay’s glitch.

Prior to the glitches, the HR staff said that Salarium’s services were “quite good” as it took care of both timekeeping and computation of salaries.

“While the financial hardship has been alleviated with our countermeasure, there is still quite a lot of money tied up with the app that we have not been able to access since as early as August 14. Morale is certainly low and employees do wonder whether the owners of SALPay have just run off and whether we will be able to get the money back,” the human resource official said.

The company is preparing legal action against Salarium.

A small coffee shop in Manila had a similar complaint where employees’ salaries totaling close to P100,000 can’t be accessed. They too resorted to manually depositing money from employees’ personal accounts after the incident. Owners are still waiting for Salarium to disburse the cash back to them.

“We’ll survive as a company but it still stings since we’ve just started to recover from the pandemic,” said Tina, the coffee shop owner who declined to be identified.

Tina, who employs 10 employees, has reached out to Salarium, but only third-party virtual assistants have responded to their concerns.

“Honestly, we have not taken any legal action since we don’t even know how to get to them directly. They have shut down their physical office months ago and we don’t know the contact detail of anyone from there,” she said.

Tina doesn’t know how to move forward, since Salarium’s office in Makati has reportedly closed and employees have been working virtually.

Internal audit

Salarium’s support team admitted to Rappler that they have frozen all of the funds it currently handles, resulting in belated disbursements. They could not ascertain when the matter would be resolved.

“As of now, all SALPay users are currently affected, even us. We are really hoping to resolve this as soon as possible,” Salarium said.

Salarium’s internal investigation indicated a disparity in disbursements and is currently investigating the issues.

“Thus, in the meantime, to mitigate the possibility of further depletion of funds, we have implemented precautionary measures, including the freezing of all funds under our management,” Salarium said.

Founded in 2013, Salarium is an end-to-end payroll system providing attendance keeping, payroll and expense processing, and salary disbursement. It is headquartered in Hong Kong and has an office in the Philippines. – Rappler.com