CUH employee was overpaid by €416k over nine years

The employee, who still works at CUH, was paid €416,353 – roughly €46,000 per annum above their contracted salary. To date, none of the €416,000 has been repaid

Cork University Hospital. Picture: Dan Linehan

A single HSE employee in its Cork-Kerry section was overpaid by €416,000 across nine years, due to Cork University Hospital (CUH) setting the worker up “on the wrong point of scale”.

The employee, who still works at CUH, was paid €416,353 — roughly €46,000 per annum above their contracted salary — between July 2010 and May 2019, when the overpayment was discovered, according to a HSE internal audit report on payroll errors.

They had been input both on the wrong remuneration scale and the wrong working hours per week.

To date, none of the €416,000 has been repaid.

The internal audit investigation report, seen by the Irish Examiner, states that “negotiations are under way” between the employee and management regarding the overpayment.

On foot of the probe, CUH agreed to review all employees on the same contract type as the employee in question, to ensure similar mistakes had not been made in other cases.

All told, the HSE’s Cork-Kerry region had racked up nearly €900,000 worth of overpayments to employees as at the end of September 2021.

The investigation of the region’s system for recouping payroll overpayments found that eight such individual payments accounted for €512,416 on September 30 of last year.

None of those accounts had seen any repayments made against them in 2021.

The HSE’s own financial regulations state that salary overpayments should be deducted from “any retirement gratuity due to an employee”. However, the payroll probe states that “legal advice indicates that the consent of the employee is required” for such a deduction to take place.

The report found that overpayment errors can result from simple data entry errors or from line managers not informing payroll officers of changes to workers’ hours or even their employment status.

All told, €224,000 via 125 new overpayments were recorded in the region over the first nine months of 2021, with €58,000 of that total stemming from pension payments. A further €21,000 resulted from overpayments attributable to the CUH payroll.

In the ordinary course of events, payroll overpayments which have been extant for longer than six years — and where no acknowledgement has been received from the payee — can be proposed for write-off.

However, the audit concluded that this practice had not been used in either 2020 or 2021.

A total of €192,000 worth of the overpayments were recovered over the nine-month period in question.

When aggregated against new overpayments recorded, the overall total of money owed to the HSE in Cork-Kerry climbed by €32,000, to €899,071 over the first nine months of 2021.

The audit overall made seven recommendations, none of which were deemed to represent the highest level of risk.

Four of those findings were of ‘medium’ risk, one of which — relating to possibly of historical debts more than six years old, unlikely to be recouped — was deemed to be ‘potentially systemic’.