Q. One of our field technicians is consistently late in providing her time sheets. This interferes with promptly billing our customers for work performed. Can we delay paying this employee as an incentive to submit her time sheets on time?

Q. We have salespeople who work on a straight commission basis. Do we need to track their hours?

Q. We recently received a court order to garnish the wages of an employee who has failed to repay a student loan. I thought that the garnishment of an employee’s wages in Texas was prohibited by law. Is that no longer true?

Q. Our pay stubs currently list employees’ available vacation, sick and other leave hours. Our new software allows employees to log in and check that balance anytime. Can we eliminate that information from the pay stubs?

With the IRS beginning a nationwide crackdown on employers that try to dodge payroll taxes, now’s the time to make sure your workers are properly classified. Starting in February, IRS auditors began poring over the records of thousands of employers to root out organizations that try to cheat the system by calling workers contractors when they’re actually employees.

In California, you can’t terminate employees for coming forward to press for enforcement of wage-and-hour claims, even if it turns out the claims were unfounded. That’s because California law strongly supports employee rights to get all the pay they’re entitled to, and efforts to punish employees who are wrong would chill efforts to challenge their employers’ pay policies.

Q. If my employees clock in before their starting time and clock out after their day is scheduled to end, am I required to pay them for that extra time?

Q. Can I deduct the cost of an employee’s error from his or her paycheck?

Q. I keep hearing that the Ledbetter Act means we may need to hold onto documents about employees beyond our current retention policies. What do we need to do to make sure our document-retention policies comply with the law?

You may be liable for wage-and-hour violations involving people you don’t ordinarily think of as actual employees. That’s because California uses a long list of factors to consider when deciding whether someone is an employee. One of those factors: Who provides the individual’s paycheck and makes tax deductions? Another factor: Who gives directions to the worker?

Puma North America has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that it failed to pay on time about $350,000 to hundreds of employees. Judge Valerie Baker Fairbank conditionally certified the class to include the company’s hourly, nonexempt retail store employees who received late paychecks between 2004 and 2008.

Q. An employee wants to borrow $2,000 from the company to cover a family emergency, and we’re willing to make the loan. How should we structure the loan and repayment terms so we can deduct a certain amount from the employee’s bimonthly paycheck? We also want to be able to deduct the balance of the loan from the employee’s final paycheck in the event he is terminated before completely repaying the loan.

Starting in February 2010, the IRS will begin to audit 6,000 randomly selected employers to give the agency a snapshot of employment tax compliance in the United States. The audits will stretch across all industries and company sizes, and will focus on employment tax issues ranging from payroll taxes to independent contractor status to executive compensation.

Q. While one of our employees was on workers’ compensation leave, she received disability payments. Due to a clerical error, we failed to take her off the payroll during that time, and she continued to receive her regular paychecks while on leave. The employee now refuses to sign an agreement to return the money on a payment schedule we were willing to set up. As a result, we would like to dock her pay for the overpayments. Are we allowed to do so?

These days, with employers having to do more with less, lots of companies outsource some functions that take a lot of time. If a vendor handles your payroll, make sure someone on the inside understands exactly how the outside provider calculates tricky things like overtime pay.