Employer Knows About Unpaid OT, Where do I go from Here? TX
Location: Texas
I’m an hourly/non-exempt employee in Texas and I’m trying to figure out how I should handle a pretty significant unpaid overtime situation.
Starting around December 2024, I regularly worked outside my scheduled hours and sometimes through unpaid lunches because of my workload. This was actual work — emails, documentation, reviewing files, making decisions, setting things up for customers, etc.
Recently my employer audited my activity and showed me a report containing system activity outside my scheduled hours. So they apparently have electronic records showing when I was working.
After the issue came up, my supervisor started entering historical overtime, but only went back to around July 25, 2026. I reviewed what they entered and found that some of the time appears to have been entered incorrectly. One discrepancy I identified effectively reduced the time worked by about 50%. I brought that up.
Today I had a meeting with my supervisor and his boss. They asked why I worked the extra hours, why I thought it was okay, etc. I told them the truth: I did not personally keep a detailed log of every minute I worked over the last almost two years, so I can’t accurately recreate every day from memory.
They know that.
But they also have the system audit/activity records showing when I was working.
After the meeting they sent me an Excel spreadsheet and told me to fill in the overtime/time that I believe I worked.
That’s where I’m uncomfortable. I don’t want to guess and accidentally overstate anything, but I also don’t want to substantially understate the hours I actually worked simply because I don’t personally have access to the company’s historical system records.
I’ve now requested the audit/activity report they previously showed me so that I can use their own records to accurately complete the spreadsheet.
I’m planning to speak with an employment/FLSA attorney because the unpaid work goes back to approximately December 2024, not just July 2026.
My questions:
Has anyone dealt with an employer asking YOU to reconstruct years of hours when the employer has electronic records that could establish when you were working?
Should I avoid estimating anything on this spreadsheet until I’ve talked to an attorney?
If they refuse to give me the audit/system records, can an employment attorney obtain those records through discovery/subpoena if litigation becomes necessary?
For anyone who has pursued an FLSA unpaid-overtime case, what records ended up being the most useful — system login/activity records, email timestamps, claim/file activity, Teams activity, etc.?
Is there anything I should be doing right now to preserve evidence while I’m still employed?
I’m not trying to claim time I didn’t work. My entire concern is basically the opposite — I want whatever I submit to accurately reflect the work I actually performed rather than making up numbers from memory.