Edinburgh City Council has been heavily criticised after it emerged that it had overpaid staff by around £700,000 during the past two years.
The council’s director of resources, Stephen Moir, explained to The Scotsman that the council has a highly complicated set of pay arrangements, with a range of variable payments and around 5,000 individual shift patterns in operation. It is hoped that a new human resources system, which went live last month, will ensure payroll systems are more effective.
In the meantime, the council is seeking to recoup the overpayments. However, it concedes that it may not be possible to recover all of the money.
“There may be some specific circumstances where individual reclaim action might be counter-intuitive for the council,” said Moir. “Following up with court action might actually be more costly than the sum to be recovered. We need to make sure there’s a value for money judgement as well as a risk management one taken.”
Green Cllr Melanie Main told The Scotsman that £700,000 was a lot of money that could be used for so many other things.
“On the one hand, it is good that council processes have detected the overpayments and that action is being taken to recover them,” she said. “On the other hand, it’s disappointing that systems have not prevented overpayments in the first place. So clearly, there is work to do to make sure that all payments made by the council are exactly in line with what is due.”
The council said around £213,000 had been recovered so far.
Speaking to The Scotsman, a City of Edinburgh Council spokeswoman said: “We have an established and well tested debt recovery policy in place for all debts owed to the council, including payroll overpayments, where these occur. We take all appropriate actions necessary to recover overpayments.”
