So – checking my bank account the other day, i was several thousand pound richer than i thought.
On closer inspection i noticed a single large deposit from my employer, i work away a lot and am always getting expenses reimbursed, so there are regularly £1-2,000 coming into my account in addition to salary each month. What i think has happened is that someone has not recognised the currency on the claim form, assumed it was US Dollars and i am about £6,000 richer than i should be.

I intend to tell my boss when he gets back off holiday in 2 weeks – but just wondered if anyone would keep quiet and wait until the firm noticed, which is very unlikely partly as my claim has 3 seperate authorsiation signatures beofre it gets to my account.

I am always very honest with my expenses because i think anything else is fraud/theft or should i just fill my boots like some of our MPs?

Report it before the bean-counters deduct it from your next salary payment(s)

They’ll notice eventually & you’ll have to give it back anyway.

Better off taking the initiative & making the first move, I reckon. Not sure I’d be keen to, if it happened to me though!

So you’re the reason i was disallowed £2.50 of mine this month!

Flag it up immediately

Report it immediately. It will be discovered, if not now, perhaps during an end of year audit. If you don’t, it reeks of dishonesty and your reputation will suffer.

Keep quiet.

Or maybe it is a deliberate test of your honesty and integrity.

Perhaps it’s a bonus for your excellent performance? Perhaps you should treat it that way….

Report it. And don’t spend it.

I’m in kinda the same situation. I get paid a monthly mobilisation allowance. For about 6 months I was being paid return travel from Jakarta to Aberdeen. I’ve since moved back to Edinburgh but the mobilisation amount remains as though I’m commuting from Indonesia.
I’ve told HR, I’ve double-confirmed my home address, and told them I suspect they’re still paying me from Indonesia, but I have emails confirming that they have my home address and the mobilisation amount is correct. With that evidence I’m whacking all the extra cash into premium bonds, just in case. Better potential returns than a savings account, and I still have it when they eventually pull their heads out of their arses and ask for it back.

6K extra now in exchange for potentially years of worry and stress.

id fess up to your boss.

its instant dismissal round here to fiddle your expenses and given the sums involved here with yours its not exactly a small un noticable error – when the reciepts at the end of the year dont tally with whats paid out the bean counters will notice.

not worth losing your job over is it ?

Tax implications as well, if payments not properly “wholly and necessarily”* incurred on work

* or whatever the wording is / was

Withdraw it all in cash, shove it down your underpants and walk into finance. Ask them if they want it back. When they say no, make sure they give you a signed letter assuring you of this.

Go home via the brothel/crack house/pub.

They’ll find it difficult to recover once you’ve blown it all on cheap floozies and hard drugs.

Send an email to accounts dept to let them know and see if they actually respond.

Don’t spend it, in case you need to give it back, but you could always store it in a savings account while they chase through the paperwork letting you earn a little bit.

You never know, they may not respond and you’ll get away with it. If they do discover the mistake at the next audit say, you can prove your honesty with the saved sent email, give them the money back and pocket the interest. Everyone’s a winner.

They will almost certainly notice so better to mention it, I was once paid £25,000 instead of £2,500. the accounts dept unsuprisingly noticed!!. (and yeah i did point it out first but they were already aware of a discrepency).

Has anybody actually mentioned that the money isn’t yours so to keep it would be dishonest?

…and flagging it up now will be good for your reputation and your karma. Don’t wait for them to come to you. You never know when you might need the favour returned.

Hmm tricky one.

Not everyone scrutinises their bank accounts – providing the money keeps coming out of the cash machine everything’s OK. You could be like this.

FWIW it wasn’t £6k but a few years ago mrs rocket was overpaid a months salary when she got a promotion. HR/accounts screwed up the financial side of it and thought she’d left; when they realised she was still there they paid her salary (2 months late) backdated an extra month

Nothing was ever said

If one of your colleagues walked into your office and saw 6k sitting there in cash and trousered it, what would you call them?
Lets try shall we:
Ex colleague?
Thief?
Sacked?
Mr Bigs bitch in Ford Open Prison?
A top bloke that is wholly reliable, trustworthy and in line for promotion?
If it’s the latter keep the money but leave the firm.

Matt24 is this a diet question?

Give it to charity.

Would cause quite a PR issue if they made you repay the money.

Hero gives surprise bonus to charity and is then called a thief by evil capitalist employer

🙂

But he would be a thief if he did that.

Robin Hood though innit? Everyone loves Robin Hood.

I’m slightly surprised you’ve asked the question.

Don’t even wait for the manager to come back, now you’ve spotted it you have to at least report it.

Would you loose your job for fiddling your expenses?

I was overpaid small amounts over a 18month period, I never noticed as my pay can vary month to month. When it was noticed the bean counters sent me a letter saying that £700+ will be taken off my next months pay. Dinna think so was my reply ended up paying back at £10 month. Best to own up because they will come back for it sooner or later.

CaptJon – Member
So you’re the reason i was disallowed £2.50 of mine this month!

Turns out mine was the gratuity added to a meal bill. 😕

Putting the moral issue to one side for a moment, I wouldn’t agree with the posters saying that this will definitely be noticed at some point, auditors etc. IF the error has arisen as you described (i.e. processed in the wrong currency). In this scenario, there’s two ways it could come to light:

1) Whoever is responsible for the budget this cost has been allocated against notices, or is challenged on, a £6K overspend and investigates it from that angle. depending on how your organisation reviews it’s costs this is likely to be within the next month, or possibly after the end of a quarter. You will probably have an idea based on the size of your operation whether this is the sort of amount that will stick out like a sore thumb or will be a tiny drop in a large ocean of sundry expenses.

2) Auditors MIGHT spot it. Auditors will not examine and check every expenses claim. They will sample them. If yours is disproportionately high (every other person has a claim for £500-£800 for the month and yours is £6K) they will likely look at yours, otherwise it’s down to chance.

If either (1) or (2) don’t happen that you will almost certainly get away with it, if you want to.

If your speculation is wrong and the reason is because they’ve paid you someone else’s expenses by mistake then it’s gonna come to light when the someone else asks where their money’s gone. Ditto if someone keyed an extra nought into the payment list – there’ll be a discrepancy, it will come to light.

If you want to keep this, my advice would be to sit on the dosh until after the company’s year end audit has been concluded. I don’t know where you are in the organisation so whether you have easy visibilty of this, but if the company is incorporated, if the annual accounts have been filed with Companies House (I’m assuming UK here) then I reckon you’re good to go.

Morally, of course, well you know the answer, and you pretty much said it yourself in the OP. Only you can resolve that one.

Robin Hood though innit? Everyone loves Robin Hood

sheriff of nottingham didnt. if you keep it, its stealing, write an email to accounts immediately, put it into a savings account and don’t touch it. or blow it all on a horse.

I’d report it ASAP, stuff like that bothers me!!

@bruneep

If the overpayment(s) was/were so small that you could not reasonably have been expected to realise, then they’re on very dodgy legal ground making you repay it all. You would be within your rights to tell them to whistle for it. (a £6K overpayment in one lump per the OP is a different matter)

Whether you are in a place where telling your employer to go whistle is feasible / advisable is something that only you will know.

Can’t believe someone would ask on a forum this kind of question.
How would you feel if underpaid, you’d flag it immediateley, so do the correct thing and report it back and send the payment back.

Not a question of morals it’s just business

exactly, candodavid. put another way, when you flag it up you’ll get brownie points that will have cost you nothing. if you don’t and it comes to light then that employer will never forget it.

Own up now. Stop reading this post and do it now. Any delay looks bad and as many have already said it WILL be spotted sooner or later. Sit tight and you could end up unemployed…

“Turns out mine was the gratuity added to a meal bill.”

Your company use concur/globalexpense too then ?

they rubbered my gratuities recently too due to a change in THEIR policy despite reasonable gratuities being allowed under corporate policy.

Send e-mail to accounts dept explaing their mistake and asking how to repay, copy in your boss and their boss.

Mention at year end review or when bonus discussions take place.

trail_rat – Member
“Turns out mine was the gratuity added to a meal bill.”

Your company use concur/globalexpense too then ?

they rubbered my gratuities recently too due to a change in THEIR policy despite reasonable gratuities being allowed under corporate policy.

I’ve got no idea what they use. I work at a university and we hand our claim forms to the black hole of administration while crossing our fingers the receipts don’t get lost.

The expenses policy changes roughly every 12 months – when i started all trips had per diems which was very straightforward. The we got a new finance director who insisted on receipts for everything. It was pointed out that much fieldwork takes place in locations were money is relatively new, getting receipts is pretty difficult. But it still took a year to alter the policy.

Now we’re in a position of having per diems for overseas trips, but receipted expenses for domestic travel, but with limits on what can be claimed. The result is you can spend up to £80 in Amsterdam unreceipted, but there is a limit of £22 for subsistence anywhere in the UK, including London.

But then there are the unwritten policies. I was denied £1.50 for Strepsils after i lost my voice teaching on a field trip last year.

A £2.50 tip? Did they close early when you left? 😀

“It was pointed out that much fieldwork takes place in locations were money is relatively new, getting receipts is pretty difficult”

nee impossible – even in what you would consider sometimes to be a civalized part of the world. If its a cash culture its hard full stop to get a receipt – ive had them written on all sorts including lavvy roll when i was in the south of ukraine.

ScottChegg – Member
A £2.50 tip? Did they close early when you left?

Hey, they calculated it (12.5% iirc)!

My only question would be how good are they at actually paying you on time – having worked at some places where it was like getting blood out of a stone – so could be seen as an ‘advance’ 🙂

Either way, its their money.

I did though work at one place that was having trouble installing its Finance system – when I left myself and a colleague spent a day trying to reconcile my expenses (like the ‘poster’ I probably generated upwards of £10k per month). We agreed on a number, which I duly wrote a cheque for.

About 2 months later the cheque was returned uncashed with a note saying they were still working it out. They also sent 2 years of detailed mobile bills and asked me to split out work/personal, and send them a cheque, or they’d tell HMRC and I’d have the tax bill (£200 per year if you remember).

About 9 months after I’d left they sent me a bill for £16k…

After a couple of letters over the next year they stopped writing.

Never mind the practical or the moral the simple answer is the legal one if you keep spend or even place in a high interest account the money you are guilty of theft or obtaining percunery advantage by deception. A conviction would be far outweigh any benefit from 6k . Notify your employer immediately and keep a record of having done so .

Thanks for all the comments – i contacted the Finance Dept this afternoon – they said they will look into it – I told them i will take extra special care of the money until they decide how much of it they want back….