When cash is tight, nothing stings like discovering you may have paid someone too much, month after month, while you were busy serving clients, chasing invoices, and keeping the team moving. In a January 7, 2026 decision from the District Court of Noord-Holland, an employer tried to reclaim more than €220,000 as onverschuldigde betaling (undue payment), only to see that claim rejected. The practical message for small employers is not philosophical at all: if your money leaves the business through routine processes you “trusted,” it can be surprisingly hard to pull it back later, especially when your own organisation signed off along the way.

Here’s the core legal idea, in human language. Onverschuldigde betaling under article 6:203 of the Dutch Civil Code is, simply, payment without a legal basis. If the employee can show there was a basis, an approved calculation, a long-standing arrangement, a director’s sign-off, or a consistent practice, then “but the contract says…” may not be enough. In this case, the judge repeated the obvious starting point (written agreements usually lead), then accepted that other, additional agreements and approvals had effectively taken the wheel. The employer’s conclusion that the payments were “undue” didn’t hold.

That is uncomfortable, because it mirrors real life. A micro-business doesn’t run on perfect paperwork; it runs on speed, goodwill, and “we’ll fix it later.” Maybe your payroll provider imported an hourly rate from an earlier employer. Maybe a bonus or pension compensation was “temporarily” agreed in a meeting and then quietly became permanent. Once those payments are repeatedly approved and processed, they stop looking like a mistake and start looking like the deal. That is where risk shows up: not as fraud-movie drama, but as small, unchallenged decisions that turn into a pattern your business now has to finance.

The employer in this case did win something, and it matters even more for small teams, because time is your scarcest asset. The court ordered the former employee to compensate damage (to be determined later) for having other employees do work during paid hours for her own sole proprietorship (eenmanszaak) and for private jobs. The judge put it bluntly: private work should be paid privately, not by the employer. That line should sit right next to your time registration and your “side activities” policy: if boundaries are vague, you don’t just lose hours, you lose trust, and you inherit a messy proof problem when you finally need clarity.

The calm takeaway is not “tighten everything until the business can’t breathe.” It’s smaller and more doable: treat approvals like money, because they are money. Decide, clearly, who may approve pay changes, bonuses, pension compensations, expenses, and time-off exceptions, and make sure those approvals are traceable in one place. Keep your cash and “kas” habits (petty cash, reimbursements, ad-hoc purchases) boring and documentable, because “everyone saw it” is not the same as “we can prove it.” And when you sense boundaries blurring, staff doing favours, side jobs creeping into work time, reset expectations early, while it’s still a conversation rather than a court file. Even the step of asking, once a quarter, “Are we paying what we think we’re paying?” can save you from a very expensive surprise later.

Ruling Rechtbank Noord-Holland, 7 januari 2026, ECLI:NL:RBNHO:2026:94