Government department overpays by £1.5m over three years

Ministry of Justice overpays its staff by £1.5m

A government department has overpaid its staff by more than £1.5m. Requests made under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that the 1,000 staff at the department were overpaid a total of £1,522,995 over the last 3 years.

It is believed that more than half of this total - £905,076 to be precise, will never be paid back. One civil servant received an extra £18,500 on top of their annual salary of £22,000.

The errors were uncovered when a new payroll system was introduced at the Ministry of Justice. Matthew Elliot, Chief Executive of the Taxpayer's Alliance, claimed that without rigorous payroll services in place, errors like this are inevitable: "Robust systems should be in place to ensure errors like this are not made, but unfortunately this is only one of many government IT fiascos."

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said that steps had been taken to resolve the problem, but stressed that its duty of care to employees means that it must treat these matters with sensitivity.

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