They're certainly allowed to ask. Now whether they are likely to enforce the terms in court, and whether the court would side with them, and whether they would recoup more than the cost of pursuing the claim, well, that's a different matter. [edit] Not to mention the risk of negative PR, and the consequences for their recruitment pipeline.

I suspect if you just said "nope" a bunch, they would come back to you and accept a compromise. They're going to get pennies on the dollar if they send the account to collections.

If this were me I'd probably start by saying "I'll give you back 33% if you sign a document disclaiming your interest in the remaining 67%" and kick off the negotiation there. IANAL of course, lol, and this kind of thing I'd want to run by a professional. This is just my gut instinct.

It was probably written in the contact that if they were fired for cause, they'd have to return the signing bonus. That is pretty typical for most signing bonuses, so that the employer is covered from employees trying to get the signing bonus and then not following through on their work obligations, and also for the employee to be covered that they won't be fired right before collecting and then denied the bonus. They're basically trying to reframe a large layoff to save money as a bunch of individual employees being fired for cause.

When the market took a downward turn, the companies likely tried to introduce new 'cause' to fire them and attempt to legally claw back the bonus. Like this example of setting unrealistic performance goals given the market turn:

"Siegel, the former banker at a Guaranteed Rate affiliate in New Jersey, said when business slowed down last year, the company introduced monthly performance goals. They hadn’t been part of the signing bonus agreement.

He emailed his boss multiple times offering to leave the company and return a prorated share of the signing bonus, but it went nowhere, he said.

In October 2022, and then again in December, he received letters saying he wasn’t meeting the performance goals, he said, and that he was at risk of termination and having his bonus clawed back."

Unfortunately US worker protections are not great (IMO), so the employees in question will likely have to face a legal battle if they want to argue for keeping their bonuses. Mortgage companies also likely have a strong in house legal team, meaning their ex-employees will have to pay out of pocket for a good lawyer if they want a chance of winning in court.

Most places in the US are also "at will employment", meaning you can be terminated at any time without warning for any reason, and that makes it much harder to argue that you were unfairly terminated. There might be a chance you could argue that the company is obviously facing financial issues and so you were let go as more of a "layoff" type termination (and then you have some more rights to things like unemployment) but it's likely to be an expensive argument that some may not be able to fund, and even then you're definitely not guaranteed to win.

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I personally was laid off a few months into a position where I had been given a signing bonus, but they were laying off the entire office and did not ask me to repay it. It was a pretty small bonus and they probably forgot about it anyways, but given that it was a large layoff they probably would have a hard time arguing that I was fired with cause. They also tried to then rehire me at a lower rate in a different region, but I didn't want to relocate so I declined.

If you read the story it would tell you. Performance goals which were unreachable were added and used to fire people 1 month short of a 24 month window during which you'd have to pay it back. The timing sure seems suspect and arbitrary and although I agree with you that the bonus terms probably say "we can fire you if you don't perform", moving the goal posts with a month left is a concern.

Still seems dubious. What if the cause is “you didn’t meet our [obscenely unrealistic] expectations”?