My Employer Gave All Employees An Extra 40 Hours Of Pto At The Beginning Of The Year. Now They’re Saying It Was An “accident” And Subtracting 40 Hours From Everyone’s Balance.

Location: Nevada, USA. My employer switched from FTO to PTO at the beginning of this year. Basically, we switched from a use it or lose it plan to an accrued plan on Jan 1st. To allow employees to be able to take time off at the beginning of the year, they added 40 hours of PTO to everyone’s balance on Jan 1st. So we started with 40 hours instead of zero. From the original notification:

“To help impacted Team Members who may have already requested FTO for the beginning of 2025 and to avoid negative PTO accrual balances, we will give impacted Team Members 40 accrued hours of PTO starting January 1, 2025. Team Members will also begin accruing PTO at their designated accrual rate starting on January 1.

For example, if a Team Member has been with the company for two years, they will start the year with 40 PTO hours and accrue their remaining hours until they reach their allotted PTO hours for a Team Member with two years of service.”

So during the year, we started with 40 hours and have been accruing at the rate designated for our years of service. Now they’re saying the system made an error. It was meant to “front load” the PTO. Instead, it added 40 hours to everyone’s balance. Now they’re going to subtract 40 hours from everyone’s PTO balance.

When the extra hours hit, we all kinda thought like cool an extra week this year. Now we all suddenly have one less week than we thought we did. Rereading it is very confusing.

My question is: is it legal for them to subtract the hours? Regardless of the answer, it’s really scummy and tacky imho.