You don't have to give your employer a bank account number, but they still have to pay you.
Quite unusual for a tech contractor though.
Quite unusual for a tech contractor though.
As a Norwegian that sounds so alien. They couldn't do anything but deposit money, so why wouldn't you?
Almost everyone does direct deposit. But it’s not a legal requirement for an employee to be paid that way.
Good point, good point...
I went to check, and it seems we've just recently plugged[1] that hole here in Norway. Salary and other benefits must be paid to a bank account now.
[1]: https://www.gpokonomi.no/2022/01/26/forbud-mot-kontant-utbet...
Presumably to avoid this:
> Because you’re trying to plant backdoors you don’t want any paper trail?
Reading up on that, it seems similar in nature to our AvtaleGiro[1]. While indeed having my account number would allow a business to issue a AvtaleGiro request, it's just a request. I would then have to go to my (online) bank and approve it, including setting up a monthly withdrawal limit. So it can't happen without action on my part.
> They’re also the same numbers that appear on cheques, so someone could easily forge a cheque in your name with those numbers.
Cheques I don't know about because they were going the way of the Dodo even when I was young, but we did have BrevGiro[2] which was a way to transfer money. However it relied on the bank sending me serialized pre-filled forms, so someone would have to steal one of those as well to be able to withdraw money from my account.
However, many Americans do say on surveys that they are doing it. This happens even if they say their income is $200k/year. The likely explanation for this is that nobody knows what it means and are answering something like "if I missed a paycheck I'd feel bad about it".
https://twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1753260817389162516
A funny thing that happens with this discourse is that it comes up all the time, and every single time a hundred people reply those numbers are a trick because of outlier rich people, and then it turns out none of them know what a median is.
There's companies that make their money on selling (now, usually older folk) literal books of cheques. One of the ways you can pay is literally for them to write themselves a cheque from "you" that gets processed digitally.
The US is a strange banking system wherein I have had the unpleasant experience of putting my card into the reader at a 7-11 and it just... Not work. Why? Nobody knows. ApplePay sometimes works -- some readers know how to handle it, others lose their shit and crash.
My clients usually issue paper checks online. Their bank prints the check and mails it. My receiving address is my bank, which deposits checks for me when they arrive.
And the payee doesn’t need to share their bank info.
https://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-pers...
(From parent) > And the payee doesn’t need to share their bank info.
And this is a US concept where having the magic numbers lets you pull any amount you want, with no ability to have a "push only" number...
The account number is on the invoice..
Yes, you can get wire transfers or ACH at most banks with a routing number and account number. But wire transfers usually cost money to send, and sometimes cost money to get. Generalized ACH transfers usually come through a service provider, and that costs money too.
Also, the same numbers can be used to credit and debit an account, and also to forge checks. So giving your payment credentials (or writing a check) is a security risk. I'm a little fuzzy on details, but someone at my employer at the time (Facebook) had my payroll data on a device in a laptop bag that got stolen in San Francisco, and as a result I had to be hyper vigilant on checking for unauthorized transactions (or get a new account number, but that's more disruptive, assuming the theft was just normal SF theft, like it probably was)