Honest employee hands back £2m overpayment

Honest employee hands back £2m overpayment

www.guardian.co.uk

An engineer has repaid £2m mistakenly paid to him by his employer.

The employee opened his payslip to find bosses had given him the sum, reported to be 1,000 times his normal salary of £2,000.

Bosses at Alcoa Howmet, in Exeter, Devon, admitted they paid a worker a "significant" sum last week following an error.

The mystery worker is said to have been stunned at the massive windfall. But the engineer – who makes turbine blades – immediately told bosses he would return the money.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Now, with a couple of days to be spotted where would I get to worldwide with this windfall before the company noticed??

I also wonder what his bank was thinking when receiving his 1000 x rise in salary into his account. You would have thought it would have been flagged straight away.

Was he correct or honest in letting them know? opinions?

Respects

www.guardian.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

Originally posted by captiva


I also wonder what his bank was thinking when receiving his 1000 x rise in salary into his account. You would have thought it would have been flagged straight away.

Chances are that this WAS flagged, but a payment being flagged does not automaticaly result in obvious action, like account freezing or anything that pro active. All it means is that investigations occur, the paying party will be contacted after a form filling exersize at the banks offices, and its generaly a big paper pushing effort for a few days while people figure out whats happening.

Was he correct or honest in letting them know? opinions?

www.guardian.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

I think that he was right to repay the money, and honest for letting them know. One would hope he did so for the very best, and most boyscoutish of reasons, but one must also assume that anyone of reasonable intelligence knows that people soon miss large amounts of funds, especialy in the sum of two million pounds, and that any money he spent from that incorrect pay packet would probably have to get paid back eventualy anyway.

It would be nice of the empoyer to let him keep any interest received on the moneys while it was in his account. That would be a few grand even if only held a couple of days i think

I don't think he would have much choice other than to be honest! It's not as if his employer wouldn't notice 2 million pounds missing from their books!

If this happened to me...

Hey, you guys overpaid me by ONE million pounds... (whistles along the walk to the bank to deposit the other one million!)

I guess the company knows they can trust that employee, now. It's hard to imagine he'd have been able to get away with it for more than a short time, though; SOMEBODY would have figured out that there was two million quid missing pretty darned quick.

It reminds me of something that happened to my second cousin when he took a new job one time. His condition of hire stipulated that he work the first two weeks at minimum wage and then if they liked him, they would hire him permanently at the normal wage. After two weeks, he got his paycheque and found that the company had accidentally paid him the full normal wage for those two weeks. Being an honest fellow, he went to see the manager about it. He was told that they already knew. They deliberately set up that scenario for all their new employees to test their integrity, and any employee that didn't come forward about it promptly would not be hired after the first two weeks. Then they let him keep the normal wage for the two weeks anyway.