Finance Manager "accidentally" paid £80,000 into her own bank account!!

[Babooshka1234]

I need to rant and ask your thoughts about a member of staff who is in a managerial position responsible in HR & Finance yet is terrible at her job and the Director doesn't do anything about it. Have I become a bit too obsessed with this women and my lack of confidence in her ability and should also ignore it or can anything be done about it? I will list a few of the things she does... yesterday paid £80,000 into her own personal bank account in error because the banking app she uses is linked to both the business account and her personal account! Last year she almost lost the business £150,000 due to a scam again using this banking app, fortunately it was stopped just in time. She pays the wages for everyone and regularly changes them if she doesn't agree with the time sheets. And despite being told numerous times not to come to work early, she still comes in over an hour early to claim overtime at time & a half and daily plays the clocking in machine to her advantage yet stamps down on anyone else if they are a minute over or under their clocking in. There are so many other things she does to annoy people and I think most people in the office have no confidence in her yet she is allowed to continue. I think what annoys me is that she is in this position of responsibility and gets away with things like this.

@Nina1013 that is so shit - it’s unbelievable that a bank of all institutions would set up an app that would allow it. I would be the same and demand that I was removed from the business account or I’d cancel my Barclaycard.

This screams fraud to me! At the very least, total incompetence not just of the individual but also the company owners/directors

Where are the control checks that should be in place? Dual authorisation on bank payments as a starting point.

😂😂😂

It’s posts like this when I miss ability to simply 😂a post

This is spot on. Lots of businesses have an MD who doesn't own the company. I have been MD of a company of a similar size to the OP's and had only a tiny shareholding. So if the MD won't listen, the person or people who stand to lose their houses might.

So many 🚩 across this.
The audit exposure, the lack of separation of duties, the issue overtime control.

You really need to raise this in a factual way, the company will go bankrupt.

Does she also do the financial statements? be worth checking those too.

I worked in finance, audit, internal audit and risk management and none of this makes any sense.

There should be no scenario where 1 person can move sums of money like that without someone else also having to approve it. No way should 1 person be changing salaries without secondary check and approval. Absolutely no situation where a company finances should be managed in one person’s personal app.

Whoever is in charge of Finance is either grossly incompetent or actively dishonest.

You need to flag your concerns up the hierarchy - 1 person with what appears to be free access to company money could bring the whole company down. This is madness.

this woman would have been sacked in a heart beat if this was my work place.

1. timesheets should be approved by managers, she shouldn't have the ability to amend anyone's against a managers approval

1. using the same app for business and personal sounds very odd...but also it would be two different accounts and logins? theres no way she "accidentally" paid herself by accident and she would have had to select her account on the payment screen to pay herself. not sure how she explained that

I would contact ACAS and CAB, ASAP.

Expect to see her name in connection with a bestselling book and film about walking the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path, whilst relying on nature and the kindness of strangers, to ease her suffering and pain in a couple of years' time... 🤔

Seriously though, I'm sorry you're dealing with this. As others have suggested, keep meticulous records to cover yourself (including copies of original spreadsheets that she may subsequently edit and submit for processing). Save them independently onto a memory stick if you need to/are able to. I'd probably also be looking elsewhere for work before this blows up (and it will, one day). I'm sorry. Best wishes to you.

In charge of the payroll, tinkering with the timesheets, accidentally paying herself £80k, nearly paying £150k to another of her accounts a scam. It amazes me that colleagues at her level or senior do nothing and even more amazing that the MD hasn’t reacted assuming he knows about all the things you mention OP.

I may be too cynical but I worked somewhere once where someone dealing with timesheets and wages had created a dummy employee in the payroll space previously occupied by an employee who left and wasn’t replaced and she was paying herself that salary too (I think that’s what was going on). It only came to light because she left something on her desk that caught the eye of someone senior who then rightly took it upon herself to dig a bit further. The payroll person claimed it was a mistake too, and at first it looked like it was but it was quickly shown to have been going on for over a year. The employee had been there a few years so was trusted but I think had got into debt and found a “solution” to the problem.

The arriving early could be struggling to cope with the job and having to put in the time to try and manage but either way she needs to go. Apart from the potential costs of errors or fraud it does nothing for staff morale to see nothing done.

Is she a member of any of the accounting qualifications, like AAT, ACCA, CIMA etc? Those are massive ethical issues that can be flagged to her membership body, potentially as money laundering. In my company, the payments are created by me (the finance manager) and then checked and approved by someone else (the CEO or Ops manager) to ensure there things like you have described can't happen. In any big business, it's required to have different people approving the payments, "segregation of duties". There is no excuse for "accidentally" paying yourself £80k, she's up to something dodgy

You need to blow the whistle on this person. Tell senior management in writing exactly what she has done, and how she alters wages on a whim. If you let this continue this could also affect any pension fund you and the company are paying into, as well. I'd tell senior management then go and see her face to face and tell her, too. Do it while you have a company to work for

Whilst she sounds like a total disaster, the banking app mistake wouldn't be that hard to do! I bank with Natwest and manage payments for our business through Natwest as well and the app is a massive PITA - for some reason DD2's Rooster and my My Rewards tab show up under both Personal and Business???

And all the stored payee list isn't separated into personal and business, so it would be really easy to make a mistake if you were in a hurry.

I make all payments on the website as it is just easier to see and double check everything is going out of and going into the correct accounts (which she should be doing, obviously), but it could be set up much better.

Not sure if you saw my post, but I mentioned the NatWest app too.

It's really annoying.

Oh and to the poster after me that said she was an accountant and would never do this.

I am an accountant and did do this!

That said, mine was for £300, not £80,000 and I'd be so, so, SO careful double and triple checking any payment of that level.

It all smacks of a company that hasn't updated their systems and procedures as they've grown. Unfortunately some companies like this will only change their systems once they've actually lost money.

The changing pay because she doesn't believe the timesheets is outrageous though. She could be opening the company up to all sorts of claims there, including potentially paying people less than the minimum wage if she's not paying people for all their hours. If you get caught with that your company will go on the name and shame list for all current and future employees to see.

@BumpyWinds it is rubbish isn't it! Actually, thinking about it, I've done the same as you, but fortunately for me it was another personal account it defaulted to rather than one of the business ones! It was fairly recently and I couldn't work out for the life of me why I transfered the money from my joint account when I was sure I was in my personal account screen - no biggie as I just transferred it over, but I only noticed as I went into my overdraft and got a text!

I'm not sure why this bit of the Natwest app is so rubbish, as overall it's miles better for functionality than Barclays, which is who else I have accounts with!

Who owns the company? Do they know what she's up to?

Hi,
Could you not ask to see the person who is in charge of this woman. Don't tell anyone you're going above her but if you can report her for this behaviour I'm sure you should get some support. Gill.