In recent weeks, payroll news has highlighted the affects and consequences of industry neglect with settlements and criminal sentences being presented to both victims and abusers of bad payroll management.
Ears have pricked up hearing how $1.1m Australian dollars were awarded in compensation to council payroll supervisor following avoidable work-related psychiatric injury. A clear signal for many Directors also overseeing internal payroll that a hands-off approach is a risky strategy, where the consequences can be expensive and damaging to credibility. (source Global Payroll Association)
Giants like Virgin Media have also suffered recently after discovering a payroll administrator who was reported to have significant payroll access had stolen over €872,000 over a ten-year period (source The Irish Times). As an ex-store manager, I know my previous Head Office teams would be alerted to discrepancies, but where was the governance overseeing this vital function within the business? Furthermore, the news article reported that this had occurred over a ten-year period thus implying that the lack of governance and controls were absent over an extensive period. Ten years! Again, as above, it feels like the management and ultimately the Directors overseeing payroll may have been engaged elsewhere in the business, believing payroll was running as usual, oblivious to the lack of controls within their payroll operation and the lack of safeguarding built into their software systems.
So, if you are in an office, and have responsibilities, planning forward for your business- but also have payroll under your umbrella- then maybe also look back too to check on it. Make sure it’s keeping up, safeguarded, accurate and doing what it should. There are health checks and audit services available for payroll, software and operations to help mitigate such risk whilst demonstrating duty of care and due diligence.
And should you conclude you’d rather remove the risk, or rather be reassured that it’s with experts, then let’s have a chat. No-one is congratulated for payroll going right, but if it goes wrong and there is a case of neglect… well we all know there are consequences!
So, if you can safeguard, future-proof and protect payroll costs whilst also reducing them, then isn’t that something to investigate and promote?
For HR/Payroll health checks, audits, consultancy, software and business process outsourcing (BPO), please contact Zalaris via the below form or on email at info_uki@zalaris.com.
