Hi, I’m about to leave Japan and, lucky me, this rubbish happened to me, as if I’ve not had enough XD
So, I would appreciate, if you could give me some advice on this matter.
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Long story short, I’ve recently joined and quickly resigned from a company and today, about a month after my resignation, I received a “request for a payment” from the company.
If you do not know what that is, it is a letter with some tables that don’t make sense much, saying that I owe some sizeable amount of money to the company and they want me to return it.
This is a short and simplified -but trust me, the original letter is not too different- summary of the letter:
\- The company wants to charge me for insurance (health, pension, etc). It doesn’t say where they came from.
**Objection #1**: Why do I have to pay for it now? Why weren’t they covered when I was still working for the company?
\- they also claim that about 1/10 of “salary for this month” has been paid and I need to return it.
**Objection #2**: My last working day was the last day of July and the amount of July salary I received was no different to other months’. + I confirm that I have not received anything from the company “this month”, August.
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I’m literally in the process of leaving Japan now (and do not intend to come back) and this letter just baffles me.
Has anybody received such letters? Is this something you can expect after you resign in Japan? Can I just ignore it?
2 comments
Without knowing the details it is difficult to answer in full.
One distinct possibility is they are asking you to pay the remainder of your residence tax for 2023 (the residence tax on your income for 2022). Assuming they have been handling payments for you, this would not be odd.
Social insurance payments lag by a month. Depending on how fast you resigned, they may not have collected any at all and had to make a payment after you were gone. Half of this is your responsibility to pay if it wasn’t able to be withheld from a paycheck.
In any case, extra social insurance coming out of the final pay is not unusual because of the time lag.