OP I would follow @Respectforpeople 's advice
Plus your manager needs to step up too.
Is there a possibility that you were originally scheduled for less time and you ended up working more and your payroll dont have the actual hours?
Sorry OP i dont mean to derail your thread, by the fraud question
@AllThatFancyPaintsAsFair in an active fraud the cash going out needs to match the total cost of paying for everybody eg gross pay. The payments will be scheduled on different days and the finance team will be checking the bank statement against the total expected payroll payouts.
How the fraud happens depends on how integrated the payroll system is as it is creating electronic files to be uploaded onto other systems.
If you could get a stand alone payroll licence for 10k and skim 60k; so 50k pa in your account with a small risk of jail ..... (most staff fraud starts small and grows as the employee takes more and bigger risk )
And with full admin access and a backup of last months payroll you could run the payroll as many times as you wished. Most systems will allow a soft close to check and allow an input correction as human error is inevatable.
Short version the fraud is built around how the money can be moved
Payroll calc
30 h at £12.50ph
20% tax
8% NI
12% pension across 2 companies 40%/60%
1000 employees
Have you paid 1000 ees Y/N
Have you paid 30,000 hours? Y/N
Are you going to do a manual check on every line of data if its not your job Y/N (or rely on employees pointing out errors that slip through (this is the risk))
Each payslip will show
375 gross
75 tax
30 ni
45 pension
225 net pay
(5+ manual calculations)
Run the reports which total the payslips
(5+1 column by 1000 numbers manual calc)
Or
Company has to payout
£375,000
Bank statement
75,000 HMRC
30,000 HMRC
18,000 pension co1
27,000 pension co2
225,000 * bank will take the money in 1 deduction and split across the employees bank accounts
Cash out and reports agree
To extract the money before any payment is processed change the bank account and create a false payslip
20 h at £12.50ph
250 gross
50 tax
20 ni
30 pension
150 net pay
The new account receives 225 and pays out 150
Employee payslip and cash in their bank agrees
Prior to real time filing employees could only check their files after the year end and even now most people may not check their payslip/ P60 against HMRC unless it causes a larger than expected net pay variation.
Payroll systems have checks and controls but they have to be turned on and monitored to work.
Anyway its too early to rule out simple human error
One way the OPs error could occur is that the system allows a soft close which allowed payroll to generate all the files. Then the OPs payroll inputs are changed. The bank and payslip file are re-run to reflect the changes but the HMRC file is not amended.
HMRC will upload the file that was sent to them against the OP (& others) and then investigat why the payment for tax and NI and the file do not match.