THE HSE MADE salary overpayments of close to €14.7m at the end of 2023.

Information from an internal HSE audit was released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The audit sought to, among other things, determine the “adequacy and effectiveness” of the HSE’s internal controls and processes to reduce the risk of future overpayments.

Overpayments

At the end of 2022, the total level of salary overpayments stood at just over €10.5m, and after around €12.7m of new overpayments were uncovered, it grew to around €14.7m at the end of 2023.

This was despite around €8.1m of the overpayments being recouped in 2023, and close to €5.2m having been recouped in 2022.

However, the date of expected repayment in full from some staff for overpayments in excess of €10,000 is 2050.

The audit also found there were 136 cases as of the end of 2023 where no repayments had been made on overpayments in excess of €10,000 – totalling €3.5m.

Write offs and repayments

Meanwhile, €388,958 in overpayments was written off in 2023, and €520,559 was written off in 2022.

Write offs occur when more than six years have passed and there is no acknowledgement from the recipient, or after four years in the case of a deceased person.

Some 6,860 HSE staff were overpaid as of the end of 2023 and 47% of these had received the overpayments during 2023 – amounting to €6.9m.

Elsewhere, overpayment cases relating to 349 staff, equalling €1.2m, stretched back over a period of six or more years.

The HSE said an overpayment arises where incorrect, insufficient, or late notification of a change to an employee’s circumstances or contract occurs.

“While every effort is made to avoid such occurrences, where it does happen, the policy of the HSE is to recover the outstanding amounts as expeditiously as possible,” said the HSE in the audit.

The HSE noted that “unsuccessful recovery of overpayment debts may be because of deceased persons”.

Of the 417 cases marked as “outstanding” and that had no repayments recorded in 2023, 56% related to deceased persons.

Reasons for overpayments

The main reason for overpayments between January-August 2023 was “master data error”, accounting for 15% of overpayments or €1.08m.

Master data errors include data inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and missing information.

The other main reasons for overpayments include late entries relating to unpaid leave, errors related to sick leave, and employees not being taken off the payroll.

There were also issues over pension overpayments.

In the audit, the HSE said that in August 2023, there was the full roll out of a Payroll Overpayments Portal which removed many of the previous manual processes and has improved accuracy.

The audit was published last November, and the HSE noted that this portal had at the time only been fully operational across all sites for less than 12 months at the time of the audit and was “still very much in its infancy”.

Going forward, the audit recommended that information of all expected repayment dates should be “readily available for review and monitoring”.

It also recommended that a review of the criteria for write offs should be undertaken.

‘Key priority’

In a statement on the audit, a HSE spokesperson said that it takes “very seriously, and works to minimise, overpayments that may arise”.

The spokesperson noted that the average annual payroll costs over 2022 and 2023 was €7.5 billion.

“The overpayments identified and outstanding as at the end of 2023 represent less than 0.2% of the annual payroll cost,” said the spokesperson.

They added that these occur due to a number of factors listed in the internal audit and that this is a “key priority for the HSE”.

‘Unacceptable’

Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on Public Expenditure and Reform, Mairéad Farrell, described the overpayments as “unacceptable”.

While Farrell said that the HSE has recouped a “significant amount of this overpayment”, she added that the “level of overpayments is quite worrying”.

She said the HSE has spent a “frightening on external consultants over the last few years” and that she expected their “internal controls would be tighter than this”.

“There are some public bodies whose entire wage bill for the year could be €14m, so this is very high.

“Given that the HSE spent €458m on consultants in 2022, which was the year before the period of audit, it raises questions about whether such money is being well spent.”

Farrell also said that the government seems “completely indifferent to overpayments/overspends, whether they occur in the HSE, the OPW, or the Civil/public Service more broadly”.