A couple of years ago, I was asked to take part in a BBC phone in programme when it was discovered that an employee of an NHS trust had been paid for several years after they had left. One of the questions I was asked was “how could this have happened?”. The answer was a simple one – poor controls – someone was signing off the payroll without doing proper checks.
Well, it has come to light that the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Partnership NHS Trust (SSOTP) has overpaid some 316 employees by a total of some £200,000. This is a trust that is £2.5 million in debt.
Their approach to the problem is to call in a debt collection agency. Now, we know that employees who remain with the Trust have already been approached to repay the overpayments voluntarily and the employees have been offered easy repayment terms.
However, former employees will receive an invoice and they are being offered a negotiable repayment plan. It is only as a final resort that debt collectors will be called on to recover outstanding amounts before the money is written off.
