him of the situation. He contacted head office as we needed nearly £7,500 in cash. Approval granted he sped off to the local bank branch, but I gasped in horror as he returned a short while later empty handed. The local branch had a limit of £5,000 to be issued on our account. Head office contacted the bank’s head office to give permission to our local branch to issue the money we wanted. This took the rest of the day to organise and my boss only just managed to get to the bank before closing time. I worked very late preparing the wage packets to be issued the following day. To make matters worse this is a two-person job for checking and security purposes – and my boss was the only one who could do it. That time alone with him, counting out and putting the money and wage slips into the envelopes, was the longest and most awkward time of my life and completed in silence. The next day I handed out the wage packets to the operatives and they all commented how pleased they were that the money was right and what a good job I had done. Many passed comments onto my boss, whose face was a picture as he regularly glared at me across the office. I lasted another two months before finding another job. Upgrade (https://bit.ly/3i8rpwI) Many years ago, we were transferring to a new payment service and also training a new payroll employee. It was decided that she and the finance director would do the BACS payments through the new system. All went well and I took a day off on the actual payment date. At 9am I got a phone call from the finance director saying none of the payments had gone through and as we would need to do 300 same-day
payments through the bank could I come in and help. I arrived at work in a total mess, hadn’t brushed my teeth or hair and was practically in my pjs! We set up each employee as a payee, and made payments by 3pm. We pulled together as a team and made it happen with only one error. I was very proud of the whole finance team that day but dread to think what anyone thought of how I looked. I still have nightmares about the only time in nearly thirty years I almost missed the payment date. The poor lass who was initially involved in the BACS process took many years to overcome her issues and would never send the payments without having me check that everything was OK. It was not her fault, it was mine as I should have checked the BACSTEL reports but thought the finance director had done this. I have never left anything to chance since then and never will – total control freak with my payroll payments now! IT (https://bit.ly/3m8RaPZ) It was back in the days when a physical magnetic tape had to be sent to BACS to process the salaries. We thought that we had a robust procedure in place with dates when the tape had to be produced and couriered to BACS with three days processing to ensure payment into the employees’ bank accounts. The payday at the Council where I worked was the fourth Wednesday of each month. On this occasion the pay date was the Wednesday after the August bank holiday, so the tape needed to be sent by courier at 11.00am on the previous Friday. Imagine my horror when I went to see the IT section head on the Tuesday after the bank holiday and, to my horror, spotted the tape sat on the side of his desk. The chap who normally had the responsibility
to send the tape had decided at the last minute to have a long weekend, and nobody had thought about looking at the procedures regarding the sending of the BACS tape. After the initial shock, I contacted a local motorcycle courier and got the tape delivered that morning meaning that the payday was one day late. We notified all employees and offered to pay any bank charges that individuals may have incurred. Needless to say, a revised procedure was put in place to ensure that the incident couldn’t be repeated!
The haunting (https://bit. ly/3jWMnPE)
I was working as a temp to cover the recently promoted payroll manager’s long-term absence for a 3,000+ employee monthly payroll about sixteen years ago. The previous temp who had three months handover left just before the payroll manager was due to go and subsequently I only had two weeks to take over. The payroll software was an old DOS-based system, to which I had no back-end access to check pay elements. I had some share gain to process, so I looked back at what had been done in the past and proceeded. It looked fine on the audit report and the person who double- checked the report under SOX agreed and signed off. What neither of us knew was the old payroll manager used to manually calculate and override the tax and National Insurance contributions as the pay element was not set up to apply them. Consequently, not only was the share gain paid without tax and NICs calculated, but the tax withheld previously was refunded. There were some very large sums to all the top management. Once I had discovered this, I had to get the payrun reversed, re-run correctly, and then phone or go to see everyone affected, apologise and ask them to return the overpayment – which luckily they did. Needless to say, I amended the pay element so it was taxable and NICable, so it never happened again. I also introduced a net pay comparison from the BACS report which was looked at before any payments were made. We are so lucky now with up to date software that you can easily see the gross to net breakdown as part of the audit process. I have not got over this mistake. It haunts me! n
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 64 | October 2020
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