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Government officials overpaid by £1.5m
Officials at a Government department have been overpaid more than £1.5m, it has emerged.
In one case, a civil servant nearly doubled their salary. The unnamed official at the Ministry of Justice was handed an extra 18,500, on top of annual earnings of 22,000.
Freedom of Information Act requests revealed more than 1,000 staff at the department were overpaid a total of 1,522,995 over the last three years – but more than half that total will never be paid back.
The department, which is responsible for prisons, the probation service and the courts, admitted 904,076 has been written off.
Officials said the errors were uncovered when a new payroll system was brought in after the department was created out of part of the Home Office and the Department for Constitutional Affairs.
Critics said the revelations showed Government "incompetence" was costing taxpayers, and criticised the decision not to try and recover large sums of money.
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "It's simply not acceptable for Government departments to hand out money by accident and then simply write it off.
"Robust systems should be in place to ensure errors like this are not made – but unfortunately this is only one of many government IT fiascos.
"In the private sector, people are losing their jobs or taking wage cuts, but this incompetence means that in the Ministry of Justice money is apparently falling out of the sky."
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said "significant steps" had been taken to tackle the problem.
He said: "The ministry is committed to full recovery of public money and will actively pursue reimbursement in all cases. It does, however, recognise its duty of care to employees and so will deal sensitively with these matters.
"The ministry accepts the Audit Committee report and is determined to see improvement in this area. It is confident that the actions it is taking will result in a significant reduction in overpayments this year."
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Wednesday 08 February 2012
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