A shift is rostered, worked, signed for and paid, and every one of those is a separate record that has to agree. One shift a month is paid to a payroll number that exists, into an account that rejects it.
I run payroll for a logistics firm with about four hundred staff, most of them on nights.
The chain is four systems and they all have to agree.
The rota, which says who is meant to work. The clocking system, which records when they badged in and out. The approval, where a manager signs off the hours. And payroll, which turns approved hours into money.
A shift that is on the rota and not clocked is queried. A shift that is clocked and not approved is queried. A shift that is approved and not on the rota is queried hardest of all, because that is how a supervisor pays a friend.
Every query has to be closed before the run goes out, and I close them, and my name is on the run.
Once a month, a night shift goes through all four.
It is on the rota. It is clocked in and out, eight hours, no anomalies. It is approved by the depot manager. And it is paid.
The payroll number it is paid to belongs to a leaver.
A leaver's record does not vanish. It cannot, because payroll records are kept for six years and a leaver can come back, ask for a P60, or turn up at a tribunal.
So a leaver sits in the system as a leaver, with a leaving date, and the system will not pay a leaver. That is not a policy, it is a hard control, and it is one of the controls the auditors test every year.
This one is paid.
The payment fails.
That is the only reason I ever found it, because a failed payment comes back on the bank file as a rejection and lands on my desk.
The account details on the record are the ones that were there when he left, and the account was closed years ago, so the bank rejects it and the money comes back.
Every month, for four years. Forty seven payments, forty seven rejections, and forty seven times the money has come back to the company.
Everything I have done.
Removed the rota line. It is a shift pattern on the depot's roster and I deleted the pattern in 2022 with the manager watching.
It was back the following month. Not restored by anybody: there is an audit trail on the roster and it shows the pattern being created by the system's own scheduling job, from the pattern library, which is where recurring shifts live, and where I had also deleted it.
Removed the payroll record. This is where I have to be careful, because you cannot delete a payroll record for six years and I did not.
I set the record to a status that cannot be paid, which is what you do with a leaver who keeps generating noise. There are three such statuses and I have used all three, one after another, over three years.
It pays.
The clocking.
Nobody at my company has an answer for this and I have asked five people.
A clocking record is created by a badge at a terminal. The terminal is a box on a wall at the depot with a reader on it, and it writes a record with the badge number and the time.
The badge for that number was returned when he left. It is in a drawer in the depot office and I have seen it and held it, and its chip is deactivated, which the system confirms.
There is a clock in and a clock out for that number, at the depot, at 21:58 and 06:03, once a month.
I have pulled the terminal's own log rather than the system's, twice, with the supplier on the phone, and the terminal has the reads in it. A badge presented to that reader, at those times.
The manager.
The approval carries his login. He has been the depot manager eleven years and I have known him for nine and I would put my house on him.
I asked him in 2023, straight out, in his office, because there is no polite way round it.
He said he approves what the screen shows him, forty or fifty lines a week, and that he has never noticed it, and then he went and looked at the four he could still see and went quiet.
Then he said the name, which I had not said, and asked whether it was still going through.
I said yes. He said, he was a good lad, and turned his chair round to face the window, and that was the end of the conversation and neither of us has raised it since.
What I do about it.
The rejection comes back and I journal the money to a suspense account, and at year end my accountant clears the suspense to sundry income, which is a real and normal thing to do with money nobody has claimed.
It is about a hundred and eighty pounds a month and it has never once been claimed.
The audit found it in 2023. A trainee working through payments to leavers, which is exactly the test she should have been doing, and she flagged it, and I explained it as a system fault with a recurring pattern, which is what it is.
Her senior asked whether any money had actually left the business. I said no, every payment has been rejected and returned.
He said then it is a housekeeping point, and it went in the management letter as one, and the recommendation was that leaver records be reviewed, which I do, every month, and have done for four years.
The only thing I have changed is that I stopped deleting it.
I tried for three years and every month it came back, and one night in the office at about eight I realised I had been treating a returned payment as an error when the money had never gone anywhere.
So now I let it run. The shift is rostered, it is clocked, it is approved, it is paid, and the bank sends it back, and I put it in suspense.
He is on the rota for the fourth Thursday of every month, on nights, at the depot where he worked, and that is where he is, and the money is the only part of it that has anywhere else to be.