Australian Worker Overpaid By A$500,000, Returns It 4 Weeks Later
28 August 2018
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A worker in Australia has been paid more than 100 times their normal salary because of a decimal point in the wrong place.

The worker was meant to get a salary of A$4,921.76 but instead found A$492,176 ($360,700; £280,250) in their account.3

The mistake was reported by the territory’s auditor-general who put it down to human error.

But the worker, based in a remote area of the Northern Territory, resisted temptation and returned the money.

The auditor-general noted that the repayment was made four weeks later, but would have been made sooner if the worker had not been based in a remote area and had to travel to a bank.

The report blamed two human errors – the incorrect data entry in the first place and then the failure to deal with a system-generated alert.

It was one of 743 overpayments made by the Northern Territory’s government departments between July 2017 and January 2018, said the report.

Of that, $767,000 has still not been returned by the end of January.

The Department of Corporate and Information Services said overpayments represented about 0.2% of the 1.2m payroll transactions it made in the NT each year.

It said it had put in place several system enhancements to prevent such large overpayments from happening again.

BBC news