Payroll Errors Impacting A Quarter Of All UK Employees

New research from The Global Payroll Association (GPA), reveals that a quarter of all PAYE employees have received an incorrect paycheque at least once, and that in half of cases, it took longer than a week for their payroll department to correct the mistake.

The company has commissioned a survey of 4,248 UK employees who are currently paid via PAYE to learn how frequently errors in payroll occur, the impact they have on employees, and how long the mistakes take to rectify.

When asked if their current employer had ever given them a paycheque that was incorrect, a quarter of PAYE employees (25%) said ‘yes’.

In 78% of cases, the mistake was that the employee was paid too little. Meanwhile, in 19% of cases the employee was paid too much, and in 3% of cases, they weren’t paid at all.

In almost half of cases (46%) the mistake arose from human error when calculating the employee’s wages.

In 29% of circumstances, paycheques failed to include the correct bonuses or overtime pay, and 11% of the time, benefit and payroll deductions were incorrectly calculated.

In over half of cases (56%), mistakes with paycheques take more than a week to be corrected while only 13% of errors are fixed on the same day.

This has a real impact on the personal finances of affected employees with 28% the error caused them to have difficulty paying bills or rent.

To make things worse, almost half of employees (46%) say that they have been given an incorrect paycheque on more than one occasion.

Melanie Pizzey, CEO and Founder of the Global Payroll Association, says:
“The payroll department is the coalface of employee relations - if you’re not paying your team correctly and promptly, it threatens to obliterate trust and makes it hard for employees to feel that they are truly respected by the company they work for.

"Businesses of all sizes can take simple, effective measures to make sure their payroll systems are as accurate as can be, but even then, mistakes can still happen.

"The important thing is how a company responds when a member of their team reports a mistake in pay. If the payroll department can respond quickly and compassionately, the mistake is likely to be entirely forgiven and forgotten about. But if the employee is left waiting for a week or more for the mistake to be corrected, it can breed very understandable resentment.”


Full survey results can be viewed online, here