When You Are Told to Do Something You Should Not Do

The instruction usually arrives casually. Trim the hours before you approve the timesheets. Put the new hires on as contractors. Find a reason for this one, and make sure it is documented. Do not approve that leave request, we cannot cover it. Handle it quietly.

Managers receive these instructions from people with authority over their careers, and they are given no time to consider them. Carrying them out creates personal exposure that does not disappear when you leave the company. Refusing creates a different problem. The Law Offices of Albert Goodwin advises New York City managers caught in this position.

You Are Exposed, Personally, in Ways You May Not Realize

The central fact is that "I was told to" is a limited defense, and in several areas it is no defense at all.

• Wage and hour law. The Fair Labor Standards Act and the New York Labor Law define employer functionally. A manager with power over schedules, pay practices, and hiring decisions can be individually liable as an employer for unpaid wages, liquidated damages, and the plaintiff's attorney fees. The manager who edited the timesheets is the person whose name is on the edits.
• Discrimination and harassment. New York State and City law permit individual liability, including on an aiding and abetting theory. A supervisor who implements a discriminatory instruction can be a defendant alongside the company, and the company may argue you acted outside your authority.
• Retaliation. Executing an adverse action against an employee who recently complained exposes you as well as the company.
• Records and documentation. Creating a false performance record, backdating a document, or altering a report is a category of its own, and it is the conduct that turns a defensible employment dispute into something worse.
• Officer level exposure. If you hold an officer title, unpaid payroll and sales taxes can become a personal assessment. See officer personal liability.

See individual liability of supervisors for the full analysis.

The Instructions We See Most Often

• Time shaving. Editing time records to remove hours, auto-deducting meal breaks that were not taken, requiring pre-shift or post-shift work off the clock, or instructing staff not to record more than forty hours.
• Misclassification. Treating employees as independent contractors, or classifying staff as exempt to avoid overtime, where the duties do not support it. See exempt misclassification.
• Building a file. Being told to document an employee, generate write-ups, or lower a rating for someone the company has already decided to remove, particularly where that employee recently complained, requested an accommodation, or took leave.
• Leave and accommodation denials. Refusing or discouraging medical leave, pregnancy accommodation, or a disability accommodation, or penalizing the use of protected sick leave.
• Layoff selection. Being handed a list where the selection pattern is visibly correlated with age, pregnancy, disability, or recent complaints, and being asked to supply performance justifications after the fact.
• Hiring instructions that reference customer preference, team fit, or longevity in ways that are proxies for protected characteristics.
• Safety and compliance, including running equipment past an inspection date, ignoring a reported hazard, or suppressing an incident report.
• Financial and regulatory, including recognizing revenue early, altering figures in a report, or omitting information from a filing.

What Protects You

New York's Whistleblower Statute

Labor Law section 740, as amended in 2022, is considerably broader than most people assume. It protects an employee who discloses, or threatens to disclose, to a supervisor or a public body an activity, policy, or practice that the employee reasonably believes is in violation of law, rule, or regulation, or that the employee reasonably believes poses a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety. It also protects an employee who objects to or refuses to participate in such an activity.

Several features matter here:

• The employee's reasonable belief is what counts. You do not have to be right, and you do not have to prove an actual violation.
• The statute covers refusal to participate, which is precisely the situation on this page.
• It generally requires that the employee first notify the employer and give a reasonable opportunity to correct the activity before disclosing to a public body, with exceptions where notice would present an imminent danger, where the employee reasonably believes the activity could result in physical harm, or where notice would be futile because the employer already knows.
• Protected activity includes disclosure to a supervisor, not only to an outside agency, which means an internal report can be enough.
• Remedies include reinstatement, back pay, front pay, a civil penalty, and attorney fees, with a two year period to bring a claim and a right to a jury trial.

Wage related complaints are separately protected by Labor Law section 215, which prohibits retaliation for complaining about wage violations internally or externally and carries its own remedies. Additional protections apply to specific sectors and to public employees. See whistleblower retaliation.

Opposition to Discrimination

Both the State and City Human Rights Laws protect employees who oppose discriminatory practices, and that protection extends to a manager who refuses to carry out a discriminatory instruction or who reports one. Retaliation claims are frequently stronger than the underlying discrimination claim, because the timeline is objective and the employer's explanation for the timing is often thin.

What to Do

1. Do not carry out the instruction while you work out what to do. Slowing down is usually possible. Asking a clarifying question buys time and, if put in writing, creates a record.
2. Get it in writing, or put it in writing. If the instruction came verbally, a short confirming email is the single most valuable thing you can create: "Following up on our conversation, you asked me to X. I want to make sure I understood correctly, because I have a concern about Y." Send it from your work account so it exists in the company's system, and keep a copy elsewhere.
3. Raise the concern through a channel that creates a record, whether that is your manager, human resources, compliance, or a hotline. Note the date, the person, and what you said. If your company has a reporting policy, follow it, because failing to follow it is the first thing the employer will point to.
4. Frame it as a compliance question, not an accusation. Managers who raise concerns operationally, referencing the legal requirement rather than accusing a colleague, get better outcomes and equal legal protection.
5. Do not take company documents. This is the mistake that destroys otherwise strong cases. You may keep copies of your own communications and documents you are entitled to have, but downloading personnel files, financial records, or confidential material to build a case exposes you to claims and can compromise the protection you are seeking. Discuss what you may keep with a lawyer before you take anything.
6. Keep a contemporaneous personal record, stored outside company systems, noting dates, instructions, and who was present. Contemporaneous notes are persuasive in a way that later recollection is not.
7. Get advice early, particularly before you refuse outright, because how a refusal is framed and documented affects whether it is protected activity.

What Usually Happens Next

Be realistic. Managers who raise these issues are sometimes thanked, and the practice is corrected. More often, the immediate response is accommodating and the medium-term response is not: a cooler relationship, exclusion from decisions, a reorganization that eliminates the role, a performance plan, or a documented file that appears within a few months. That pattern is why the record you create at the beginning matters so much. Temporal proximity between protected activity and adverse action is powerful evidence, and it is only available if the protected activity is documented and dated.

If a performance plan or an investigation follows your report, see responding to a PIP and being investigated at work.

If You Already Did It

Managers often come to us after carrying out an instruction they were uneasy about, sometimes years later, when a lawsuit or an audit surfaces. That situation is more difficult but not hopeless. What matters is what you can show about the instruction, your objection if you made one, your authority or lack of it, and whether you personally benefited. Whether the company will indemnify you, and whether employment practices insurance covers you, becomes important quickly. What does not help is destroying anything or revising the record now. See individual liability of supervisors.

You can contact us by phone at 212-233-1233 or by email at [email protected].