COMPLIANCE
Tales from the crypt – payroll horror stories
Horror stories aren’t restricted to tales of ghosts andwerewolves – payroll professionals will tell you that there is noworse feeling than realisingwhen something has gone wrong. Can you relate to any of the scenarios below?
The great payroll email scam Some horror stories haunt you for life, and this one will no doubt stay with me until I press the big red button for the final time. It was one of the busiest periods of my career, during a system implementation. There was a short period of testing to familiarise us with the new system and then the parallel run phase started. Everyone in payroll will know what those two dreaded words mean…doing everything twice. Absence hit the team hard during this period and the extra workload meant the hours between nine to five flew by in the blink of an eye, and overtime went through the roof. However, none of this was my actual payroll nightmare. The nightmare arrived on pay day, when a director called to enquire why he hadn’t been paid. I scanned through his records and noted that he’d emailed to change his account details that month. I called him back to confirm the change in details and he told me the words that no payroller wants to hear – it wasn’t him who made the request. It was a scam. I was horrified I’d fallen for such a simple trick, and I’m not ashamed to admit I shed a few tears when I confessed my error to my manager. We rectified it
straight away, and with the new system in place, we have been able to ensure all bank changes take place via employee self-service. The security measures within the system are stronger than any manual change could ever be, and it’s a lesson in security that I’ll never forget! Payroll gets Punk’d! Christmas is usually the wrong season to set a horror story, but it’s where my story takes place. The company I previously worked for would often give a bonus to staff at Christmas, but it had been a tough year and it seemed unlikely there was going to be one this particular year. The payroll team would usually find out three or four days before BACS deadline day, so we had sufficient time to include any bonus within December’s pay. The day before BACS deadline day, I left the office having heard nothing about a bonus. That evening, my social media was bombarded with pictures of an official communication that had confirmed there was going to be a Christmas bonus. Immediately, I panicked. I didn’t have enough time to prepare the figures and send BACS – TOMORROW. I called my boss to enquire how on earth I hadn’t been informed about this
before, and to my surprise, she had no idea either. It was at that point we started to get suspicious, and within the next hour, our suspicions were confirmed. It was a hoax – or more precisely, a prank that went viral. The following day, I sent the BACS as planned and my Christmas payroll prank saga soon became a distant bad dream.
Pandemic payroll panic The pandemic has caused many
nightmares for payroll professionals so I’m sure I am not alone with this nightmare. After setting up my new working space on the kitchen table, I was relieved to be able to successfully log into my payroll system to process the monthly payroll. However, to my surprise, the screen I was looking at didn’t seem familiar at all. For some unknown reason, the software was still sitting at period twelve – the year end we completed whilst in the office hadn’t saved on the server. After days of attempting to resolve the situation, the cut off for BACS processing days was looming, so there was no other choice but to manually calculate the payroll. Out came the manual tax tables so that I could manually calculate 70 employee payslips so I could send a figure across to the BACS office. Now I know I could have used last month’s BACS file; however, bonuses were paid in month twelve, therefore, they wouldn’t be as accurate.
...it wasn’t him who made the request. It was a scam.
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | October 2021 | Issue 74 28
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