3k owed from mat leave overpayment!

[Allnurseandnopay]

NC for this due to paranoia for my bosses reading (they don't)

I'm a nurse in the NHS. My manager didn't fill in a form informing payroll I'm on mat leave. I didn't notice until October's pay date, as I was on full pay for the first 8 weeks. I let my manager know, it was past the deadline for November's pay to be corrected so I was overpaid then too. I got paid £1800 in December which is correct. I expected to be billed £1500ish for the tso months overpayment, then this delightful letter arrived today.

I was told I get 8wks full pay then 18 weeks half pay plus SMP. I work regular 9-5 hours so my pay is a static 2.5k, and was correct on my qualifying week.

I called payroll and they said I was £900 overpaid on the months I was meant to be on full pay. They are sending calculations later, but WTF, how?! The only thing I can think of is if London weighting isn't included? I just thought full pay meant full pay.

HR said they'd send me a forecast months ago but they never did. I stupidly wasn't worried as my pay is static.

Any HR geniuses around?

NHS occupational mat pay uses the same rules as SMP to calculate 'full pay' so it's based on your average weekly earnings in the 8 weeks upto and including the last payday before the end of your qualifying week.

SMP is calculated based on your earnings which count for National Insurance purposes, so any salary sacrifice deductions would reduce these earnings eg. salary sacrifice pension, childcare vouchers, cycle to work etc.

Can you think of any reason your pay could have been lower than normal during the 8 week calculation period?

I was told I get 8wks full pay then 18 weeks half pay plus SMP. I work regular 9-5 hours so my pay is a static 2.5k, and was correct on my qualifying week.

Was it static for the full 8 weeks/2 months of the qualifying period?

No way to calculate it on the info you’ve given.

Can’t use net pay to calculate because the reduction in salary impacts on tax and pension amounts.

Need to know whether there was any reduction during the qualifying period.

Payroll will usually use gross figures. £900 gross isn’t what you will pay back.

It was static in the 8 week period beforehand. 2.4k is the after tax and deduction total, the only other deduction is pension which is usually 300ish

If you can, try to do your own calculations and get a detailed breakdown from them. I was told I’d been overpaid. I then went through my payslips and worked out what I should have been paid. Turns out I’d been underpaid instead.

How do they work it out? I naively thought full pay meant full pay.

So in the qualifying period, I was paid 2.4k a month after tax and pension. For August, September, October and November I was paid 2.4k. I was supposed to have 8 weeks full pay, so I presumed August and September were correct? My correct half pay/SMP pay in December was 1800.

What's your gross (before any deductions) monthly salary and your tax code, and what date did you start mat leave?

My gross pay is 3652, tax code 1185L cumul

Thank you so much for checking this for me

Did you start mat leave 1st August?

Mat leave started 5th August

Sorry, that tax code was from March. My current one is 1250L cumul

There are more than 4 weeks in a month, so you should have received less than a full month’s pay in your second month of mat pay.

Can you go to your union?
As if you need this worry about this whilst you're trying to focus on your new addition.

I'll do some quick-ish maths and see if I can come up with a working theory on what's happened!

Me too! (Love a payroll challenge!)

That salary isn’t a 2019/20 pay point. It’s from 2018/19. Have you got access to your payslips on ESR? Why’s your current pay point? Are you top of band 7? You mentioned London weighting too?

Haha NeedAnExpert shall we have a race?

If you're NHS then I will happily defer to your expertise as my payroll background is local gov and private sector so my maths is based on attempting to interpret the NHS T&C handbook correctly!

I'm mid band 7, that was my pay from March. April's was 3795, that's including London weighting of 564

You get taxed on the smp, so half pay plus smp is not half pay plus £600, it's closer to half pay plus £450.

Also, 8 weeks is not two months - it's a week shy of this (2 months is 61/62 days or nearly 9 weeks). Maternity pay and smp is worked out on a weekly basis, not monthly.

Have you dragged your 9 months of paid leave over a year by chance? Almost identical thing happened to me.

As I started leave on the 5th, and August has one BH, wouldn't this even out the 8 weeks vs. 2 months thing?

My half pay + SMP rate is 1800 according to payroll, which is what I imagined. This would leave me owing 1400ish, not 3k!

so annual salary = 45540
Weekly that’s 875.77
Full pay for 8 weeks from 5 Aug to 29 Sept

So August used 3 weeks and 6 days of mat and you would have had full pay = 3795

September would have been 4 weeks and 1 day at full pay and 1 day at half pay plus
SMP = 3668.50 + 63.25 + 20.74 = 3752.49

18 weeks is 126 days, so you have 125 days half pay plus SMP left.

October would be 31 days of half pay plus SMP = 1897 + 642.94 = 2539.94

Leaves 94 days half pay plus SMP

November would be 30 days of half pay plus SMP = 1897 + 622.20 = 2519.20

Leaving 64 days half pay plus SMP

December would be 31 days of half pay plus SMP = 1897 + 642.94 = 2539.94

Leaving 33 days half pay plus SMP

Totting all of that up you should have received 12606.63 gross for Aug, Sept, Oct and Nov but you received full pay of 15180 so a gross overpayment of 2573.37. There would be a reduction for tax and pension overpaid on this.

But you really need to get your payslips and look through them.

I've done a similar set of calculations to the above, but i took the pension of 9.3% off the earnings before calculating because I'm assuming it's salary sacrifice so it would come off for SMP calcs and I based it on handbook saying the same calculation is used for occupational mat pay - happy to be corrected if that's not how NHS does calcs!

So I have AWE of 835.03 for SMP which I've used as 'full pay' figure.

Pretty much same breakdown as above (can't be bothered to type out whole thing on my phone!) but I get an overall total overpayment of 3195 as I'm using a lower full pay figure.

I did also have to guess the salary pro rata calc for 1 to 4 Aug so could be out by c. 150 on that too.

Before you panic about figures, bear in mind we're both talking gross figures and payroll be will too, so the actual net effect of paying back 3k is more like 2k after tax etc is adjusted.