Augment Elements

Augments are amounts you pay an employee that are:

1. In addition to their regular rate of pay

2. Considered nondiscretionary

They can be bonuses for meeting performance or financial goals, attendance awards, payments for on-call time, commissions, piece rates, incentives, training pay, and so on.

Because they're often earned in acknowledgment for events in the past, for the purpose of calculating overtime, you have to distribute their value retroactively. The payroll process recalculates the overtime by prorating the augment's amount across the periods during which it was earned.

For example, you pay employee commissions monthly and pay the salary semimonthly. Therefore, the payroll process divides the commission evenly over the pay periods during the period it was earned with 50 percent allocated to each semimonthly pay period.