Revenue overpayments to staff reached €1.7m by end of 2023

The total number of salary overpayment cases at the end of 2023 was 1,430

The audit report, which was released under freedom of information legislation, found that no money had been repaid and/or no recoupment plan was in place for 212 out of 400 overpayment cases dating from 2002 to 2017.

This is a bit mortifyig. Why would they give people a stick to beat them with?

Surprising that there's no comment/quote included from Unions that represent the staff.

The unions didn't cause this. They’ve no dog in this fight.

They'd only have a dog in the fight if the 1,430 staff were underpaid?

Otherwise, 'Sure it's grand, Nothing to see here. Move along'?

The recovery of most of this money should be extremely easy. Small amounts could be recouped pretty fast and by agreement with the consent those involved. Large amounts can be repaid by staff over periods of time. The main problems are:-
1. If a member of staff who owes the money resigns without refunding the overpayment.
2. Inability to refund.
This is not a new problem. I’ve seen overpayments/underpayments being made quite often. These occur when pay awards are confusingly presented to payroll staff. I don’t see too many blinking over this other than the payroll staff who’ll be resolving it.
3. How many of the overpayments and what amounts occurred into 2025 and continuing? Did the overpayments stop in 2023 - I bet they didn’t.

This happens in every company and depending on the value involved, can be a pain from a tax perspective as well, (in that the employer may want to recover the amount paid before tax, the employee has been paid less due to tax) and in some cases I've seen, it was more hassle then it was worth to sort it out. It's especially common where you have a whole pile of allowances, staff with legacy T&C's that have never been bought out, old terms covered under TUPE, ability to buy and sell leave and so on.

There are valid reasons why you cannot recover as outlined above, death being another obvious one.

The one statement that would concern me was
Overpayments of €55,645 were identified as having been paid to 100 individuals who had not taken up employment as expected

That may be for people who started and resigned quickly and there were issues with notice periods etc but could it also mean people were put on payroll who never actually turned up

In fairness, they are trying to recover some of the money, but the amount of wrong payments strikes me as far too high for the number of staff concerned in the Dept

Leper said:

The unions didn't cause this. They’ve no dog in this fight.

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They will have when their overpaid members come running to them whining about being asked to repay their ill gotten gains!

It appears to be sytemic. There's no mention of errors on underpayments. Hardly credible that that number of staff don't know that they've been overpaid. It's just a terrible look for this specific Department.

'You paid me too much. Here's a EFT for the after tax amount that's due back to you. Fix the system.'

Can't help thinking that those members of the public that owe Revenue money won't be linking to the article in their correspondence and that's not going to be a morale boost for staff.

Marsupial said:

They will have when their overpaid members come running to them whining about being asked to repay their ill gotten gains!

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They do not have a leg to stand on, if they were any way honest they would have contacted payroll and flagged it.

This happened to me a while back and I immediately got on to payroll.

I do not buy this "I didn't notice it" nonsence either, had they been left short there would have been a mini riot.

When I was a civil servant a member of my staff resigned her post because she was emigrating to Australia. After she had left, it was brought to my attention by HR that she had a deficit of 2 days on her flexi-time record. I was asked was she due any time credits, but I was only able to give her half a day.

As there was no prospect of having her extradited from Australia to work off the 10½ hours due, HR informed me that her shortfall of 1.5 days would be recorded and the overpayment of salary would be recouped from her lump sum when she applied for her pension at some time in the dim and distant future (she would have been in her late 20's when she resigned!)

Presumably, somewhere in my former organisation's archives this is logged as an overpayment of wages; I wonder if Revenue have some similar ex-employees on their list.

It’s not unusual for people not to recognise that they’ve been overpaid. I know nurses who didn’t open their payslips in years, I kid you not. Also, most people don’t like owing money to anybody and usually try a repay any overpayment asap.

When I was an unpaid trades union official I’d have no trouble advising that overpayments should be repaid. If there was difficulty involved likewise I’d have no issue with representing such people.

In my experience as a former HR manager in the public sector, overpayments that occur are pursued as much as they reasonably can be. I presume this happens in the private sector as well.

The overpayments can be so insignificant (on a weekly or monthly basis) that can easily be unnoticed by the recipient but over years they can amount to a significant sum that can’t reasonably be recouped quickly.

That said, I’ve seen situations where people who’ve unknowingly been overpaid in the public sector have been strong-armed into making the required repayments quickly. Not sure if this should necessarily offer any comfort to those who are otherwise appalled.

Leper said:

I know nurses who didn’t open their payslips in years, I kid you not.

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But they'd surely recognise consistent overpayments based on what lands in their bank accounts weekly, monthly or fortnightly. I know I would with payments from three sources landing in mine.

I think it can be pretty easy for employees to miss an error. I just had a look at a HSE payslip from a few years ago. It had 1 field for basic pay and 5 different variable hourly rates:

• A-OT T+1/4 STND
• A-OT T X 2 STND
• A-OnCall OT 1/2 NCH
• A-OnCall OT T+1/4 N
• A-OnCall OT x.60 NC

We were paid a month in arrears and the numbers were different every single month depending on whether we took annual leave, did overtime, on-call patterns, etc. There would also be occasional reimbursement for mileage, courses, exams. Then you would have random pay increments. It was very difficult to keep track of this.

We were regularly underpaid. In one hospital it was almost every payslip, eventually most of us gave up checking because the process to query it was exhausting.

I was only ever overpaid once, it was about a week of pay. I alerted them and their response was to send me an extremely aggressive email that read like a solicitor's letter written by someone on mind-altering substances, including "YOU MUST REPAY THIS MONEY URGENTLY" in all caps. They then proceeded to dock my entire next month's pay without telling me, bearing in mind that I only owed them 1 week of pay. I went to the union, they were very helpful and got it sorted, but it was like a Kafka play.

I can state with some degree of confidence that most of those payment types would not apply to staff In Revenue, nor would Revenue Payroll be quite as chaotic as the Health Boards/HSE!

mathepac said:

Revenue Payroll be quite as chaotic as the Health Boards/HSE!

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That reminds me of that great quote from joseph Heller, author of Catch 22. A few years after it was published an interviewer opined that he hadn't written anything as good since Catch 22. His reply was "I know, but who has?".