Himachal Pradesh High Court guidelines in cases where recovery from employees not permissible

Vijay Arora

Shimla, March 28

The High Court has issued broad guidelines under which recovery by employer(s) will be impermissible by law.

A Division Bench, comprising Justice Tarlok Singh Chauhan and Justice CB Barowalia, has observed that “Recoveries from Class III and IV employees (Group ‘C’ and Group ‘D’ services) are impermissible in law. Besides, recoveries from retired employees or those who are due to retire within a year are also not permissible. Recoveries from employees when the excess payment has been made for a period in excess of five years, before the order of recovery is issued, is not allowed.”

Recovery is also not allowed in cases where an employee has wrongfully been required to discharge duties of a higher post, and has been paid accordingly, even though he should have rightfully been required to work against an inferior post and from Class III and IV employees even on the basis of undertaking.

While issuing these guidelines, the court observed that “the aforesaid categories of cases are by way of illustration. It may not be possible to lay down any precise, clearly defined, sufficiently channelled and inflexible guidelines or rigid formula and give an exhaustive list of myriad kinds of cases. Therefore, each of such cases will be required to be decided on merit. Thus, it will be clear that no inflexible rules regarding recovery can be culled out and each case will have to be decided on its own merit, keeping in view the broad guidelines, as mentioned above”.

The court passed the judgement on a bunch of petitions filed by petitioners, who are either serving or retired government servants or their successors, challenging recovery notices against them by the employer.