HR professionals have been advised to stay aware of their payroll after a bank mistakenly paid out £130m from business accounts on Christmas Day. In addition, it is urged that staff should be encouraged to check their payslips.
The BBC have reported that Santander made a technical error resulting in approximately 75,000 accounts receiving unexpected payments – including some accounts receiving duplicate salary payments.
Samantha Johnson - Policy Lead at the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals - said:
“Payroll professionals look to their banking providers to deposit wages to employees, and technical errors such as this can create havoc for payroll teams who will no doubt have received an onslaught of queries from employees who were affected.”
She added:
“In addition to encouraging payroll checks within the department, the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals also encourages everyone to get into the habit of regularly checking their payslips to identify mistakes like this quickly, before it becomes a bigger problem.”
Claire Williams - Chief People Officer at CIPHR, leading UK HR and recruitment software provider - said that if HR and payroll teams were upskilled, manual payroll errors could be avoided.
She stated:
“Have a clear and defined segregation of duties, with appropriate levels of checks along the way… If you are using a payroll bureau or managed service, make the most of technical integrations to avoid further risks of manual errors”.
She added that, whilst errors made by banks are outside payroll managers’ control, processes should be put in place to minimise the risk.
Whether payroll is a part of finance - or HR, the two departments need to work together. A recent study showed that senior management often miss the problems facing their teams - front line staff were found to see 100 per cent of the problems; middle managers only 74 per cent; team managers 9 per cent and senior executives just 4 per cent.
The BBC were told by Santander that a scheduling error had caused these mistaken payments. They stated that the error was quickly rectified but that the recipients would have included employees and corporate suppliers, adding that the mistaken payment was funded by Santander reserves. Other banks - including Barclays, HSBC, NatWest and the Co-operative Bank - were in talks with Santander to solve how to reclaim the money.
Although some of the money had been returned, the worry was that if some of the recipients of the mistaken payments had already spent the money, rival banks would be unlikely to return the lost money if it resulted in their customers going into overdraft.
