The sum of money involved is approximately £170,000. All staff affected are being
written to and advised how to repay the amount overpaid.
NHS Highland’s Chief Executive, Roger Gibbins, said:
“This is extremely unfortunate and I apologise for any inconvenience this has
caused staff. The same amount will have been credited twice to their accounts
today, so hopefully they will have already realised that a mistake has been
made. The overpayment will have to be repaid and we will be agreeing this
with the staff individually.”
He added:
“This has been caused through problems with BACS processing. We will be
taking this up with BACS and our bank to seek reassurances that this cannot
happen again.”
Note to Editors:
The full explanation as to why this happened is complicated but is as follows.
There has been an initiative where all employers have had to change their BACS
payments over to BACSTEL-IP. This was set up and applied to the first available
payroll process, week 39. On running this process we were informed that this had
failed as the BACS reference was not accepting this process. With assistance from
ATOS Origin the BACS file was re-created using the “amended” details, and this
worked OK.
Due to the early Christmas payroll processing we had already processed Week 40
payments and this file was highlighted by BACS as also due to fail when it was
processed. A new BACS file was then subsequently processed.
The double payment has arisen as initially BACS stated that the initial BACS run for
week 40 would be rejected so steps were taken to created a “valid” run.
Unfortunately, there appears to have been a change made at the BACS end of things
which we were not aware of which resulted in the initial run now being accepted and
hence the double payment.
