Well, the responses seem reasonable to me, I assume hashrefinery is likely in the same situation as zpool and paying out a reasonably big chunk of earnings in altcoins.

To respond to some of the finger pointing here, I wasn't trying to stir up trouble, but thought the observation was interesting.
IMO there's no way anyone could have predicted the two explanations from zpool and ahashpool as to what those payments were without asking.

For the record, I'm currently a happy miner on zpool, after trying out all three.