A drive to cut the Northern Ireland Civil Service’s headcount resulted in hundreds of staff being underpaid and around two dozen receiving excess payments that bosses are seeking to recover, it has emerged.
Northern Ireland’s Voluntary Exit Scheme accompanied a 2015-16 recruitment freeze designed to shrink down staff numbers by between 3,000-4,000, and was funded to the tune of £109m.
New figures have shown that to date 210 participants in the scheme were underpaid while around 30 were overpaid by an estimated total of £50,000, which may not be recovered.
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Local media reports suggested that a computer error was the result of some of the overpayments, a claim denied by Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance.
The Belfast Telegraph said dozens of letters asking overpaid former staffers for an average of £1,618 to be repaid had been sent out, stating that the Department of Finance was “obliged to seek recovery" in accordance with the manual Managing Public Money.
A Department of Finance spokeswoman confirmed to Civil Service World that around £170,000 had been paid to the 210 former civil servants identified as not having received their full entitlements.
She said the differences between the payments made and the correct amounts were “readjustments” rather than errors and would in may cases have involved changes in circumstances for staff that were not reflected at the time their entitlements were calculated.
“The vast majority [of these cases are] to do with where pay scales change” she said.
According to its most recent statistics from the beginning of January, the Northern Ireland Civil Service had 21,663 full-time equivalent staff.