PAYE overpayment - employer trying to reclaim money lost to deductions

chrismiller78

Hi , im going through similar circumstances where i have overpaid £2200 in my february wage,my work is now asking for it backover 4 payments as they say "This is a generous offer" and that we have had the money and should not have spent it ?,the scenario came about when i was working nightshift and we get an increased hourly rate and i also done 4 weekend overtime shifts ,when i gt my wage slip it was roughlyy what i was expecting so therefor i used the money as the intended use for what i had done the overtime for,

my anger is that

1- when i paid this money i paid 40% tax as i was over 41.000 before this was paid
2-they want too deduct 550 for 4 months from my top line ,is this the correct way of doing so as i never recieved 2200 because i paid tax on it and recieved approx 1400

please help as this driving us crazy

chris

comeandgo

Hi Maybe if you started your own thread you may get more replies as people who can help you may not realise there is a total separate issue tagged on this original post.
To answer your 2nd point, it is the correct way to get the repayment, it is taken from your top line as it was added to your top line.
1st point - you are in two different tax years and it is more difficult to sort out. The overpayment was for 2012/13 and I would imagine all year end paperwork has been completed and you will have your P60 showing total pay and tax for the year. I have never had to change P35 and P60's after year end and would imagine it would take a lot of time and effort if it can be done. Your employer is within their legal rights to take repayment for overpayments but usually it is done with as little problems for the employee as possible as they are the innocent person.
What I would do if I had made this error would be look at what the employee should have been paid without the original error, then see what the overpayment came to -and take that back from top line. This would be in employees favour but as I said, you did not cause the error.
Was it only you who had this error as in computer payroll land its very unusual for only one employee to be affected.

comeandgo

Another point aside, how on earth could you not notice a £1,400 overpayment? But then again, the payroll staff should have parameters in place that show up employees who's wages are higher than normal.

mysk_girl

Capita overpaid me in February, not by such a vast amount though! I spoke to payroll and made it very clear I would expect them to sort out tax/NI the next month and they did. I got an NI refund and the tax worked itself out as it was before the end of the tax year.

They should be able to rerun last months payslip to get the correct NET pay. Then run this months to get the correct NET pay for this month. They know how much they have actually paid you, so ahould be able to calculate the corrext NET pay you receive this month so that the sum total over the 2 months is correct. Hope that makes sense! How this will be reflected on your payslip, I don't know... I was only dealing with NI, not pension or student loan...

joshw86

comeandgo wrote: »

Another point aside, how on earth could you not notice a £1,400 overpayment? But then again, the payroll staff should have parameters in place that show up employees who's wages are higher than normal.

I didn't notice for a number of reasons:

• I had been out of work for about half of FY 2012/13 before starting this job in January, and I've had a number of tax rebates due to the fact that I didn't earn over my tax threshold before leaving my previous job.
• I haven't worked a regular month since January, as I've had gaps in my contract and the number of days worked in any given week has varied a fair bit.
• Payroll cocked up in March and didn't pay me on the usual date, so I requested an advance to tide me over to April which was granted. However, in the same payslip in which my advance was processed (roughly a week after my pay date), my March pay was correctly processed!
• One of the deductions in my nightmare April payslip was to pay back the advance. (As a brief aside, the deduction was made from April's post-tax pay, and the advance was included in March's pre-tax pay meaning that I was stung for tax on it twice. This can't be correct?)

All of the above meant that my payslips have varied so much that I don't have a good handle on what "normal" is. I did notice the overpayment in my basic pay, but as the net pay came to roughly the correct amount I assumed it was some fudge made my payroll to correct their !!!! up from the month before. Sigh.

harrys_dad

If you "didn't earn up to your tax allowance and got tax rebates" up to January how can you have got into top rate tax band by end of March? To me this is the main complication, so are you sure it applies?

joshw86

harrys_dad wrote: »

If you "didn't earn up to your tax allowance and got tax rebates" up to January how can you have got into top rate tax band by end of March? To me this is the main complication, so are you sure it applies?

Not sure. I know that a large amount of tax was taken - larger even that taking April's incorrect basic pay and taxing a pro-rata rate as if I were earning that amount each month. I haven't managed to get any breakdown from Capita of how the tax deduction was calculated, I just have the top level figures from the payslip.

Firefox1975

Were you on a Mth1 Tax code? if so, you will probably receive a refund direct from HMRC when your P14 is processed.

joshw86

Huzzah.

After days of pleading I have finally been put in touch with someone at Capita who sounds like they actually understand how payroll systems work. The cretins I have been speaking to previously all sounded like they would have been lucky to scrape a pass in their maths GCSEs. Sorry - GBiMs (Gove Baccalaureate in Mathematics).

They're on the case and they're going to sort all of their errors out without impacting my take home pay.