When I changed this it starts to go into the second section, but it still doesn't recognize "stop", it just acts as though stop is a name, and it asks me for the employee wage forever.
your vars are set as int, you can't assign stop to an int, it will throw an InputMismatchException. my guess is, use Integer.parseInt() method, change the declarations to a String and if the user types stop, do your close and System.exit();