A payroll glitch that allowed vastly overpaid me for months.

This happened years ago and I've never told anyone. I think its been long enough that they can't ask for the money back, but I still get nervous.

I was making about $26 an hour. During our shift we would clock in and out of jobs as we started and completed them. Each "job" was for a different company, I worked at a fabrication shop. Certain jobs had tasks that would pay close $70 an hour. The company was pretty stingy on handing those tasks out, but I would average 5-10 hours of my 40 hour work week making $70/h.

One day they had their tech guys come in and change some things with the computers where we would clock in and out of our daily jobs. Nothing on my end changed, clock in and out of the jobs per usual.

I noticed my next pay check was significantly higher and had about 20 hours of $70/h work. I figured I didn't realize some of the tasks I was doing were at the $70/h rate and felt pretty lucky! Next week I had about 25 hours of $70/h. I felt lucky, but suspected something was off.

The third week I mentally tracked all the tasks I did that were considered $70/h work and was at about 10 hours for the week. Nope, another 22 hours at $70/h. I definitely knew something was off at that point, but kept my mouth shut. Another guy mentioned something about his paycheck being bigger and we silently agreed it was better to not say anything.

This went on for months. At a certain point the office people asked a couple questions about how we were clocking in to jobs but didn't ever say anything about our hours. IT was at our computer a couple times during this timeframe and after 4-5 months they must have fixed the error.

I'm not sure how much extra money I ended up with, but I know it was a lot more than I should have. I kept all the extra in savings in case they came back and said they had overpaid me and needed the money back. COVID hit, with slowed real bad, and they laid most of our department off. I ended up getting a job with another shop when work picked back up.

Do I feel guilty, not really. This company was super shady in a lot of ways and never treated employees well. Should I have said something? Idk, maybe...

TL;DR; Glitch in pay roll lead to me being paid almost twice as much as usual for about 5months.