RENFREWSHIRE Council has accidentally overpaid its staff more than £1.5million over the last five years, it has been revealed.

While just over half of the money has been recovered by the local authority, there is still more than £710,000 outstanding, while more than £43,000 has been written off.

The figures were obtained by the Local Democracy Reporting Service via a Freedom of Information request.

Council bosses have said many of the overpayments involved delayed notification of an employee’s change in circumstances.

The local authority also said it has been starting to see improvement in its recovery rate and, with the majority of overpayments which remain outstanding, a plan is in place to retrieve the cash.

“Large, complex organisations like councils will experience salary overpayments, mainly occurring from the delayed notification of an employee’s changes in circumstances,” a Renfrewshire Council spokesman said.

“Since introducing an enhanced recovery process two years ago, we have seen indications of an improvement in the recovery rate for 2019 and 2020, with more than half of overpayments to employees recovered in full.”

Between April 2015 and March 2018, a total of £812, 255 was mistakenly paid to employees and only £351,448 of this – or 43 per cent – has been recovered.

More than £439,000 from this period still needs to be retrieved, while almost £21,000 has been written off.

Between April 2018 and March 2019, overpayments totalling £306,374 were received by employees.

The council reported that £178,453 has been recovered, with £120,000 still outstanding and just over £7,500 written off.

Between April 2019 and March this year, almost £450,000 was accidentally paid out to staff but £284,425 has been recovered.

However, the amount of money written off between last year and the previous almost doubled, with £14,647 lost in the past 12 months alone.

Read all the latest from Renfrewshire and beyond

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