Foreign Office overpays its civil servants by £600,000 (

Back...) And they’ve given up on getting most of it

HUNDREDS of lucky civil servants have been overpaid by nearly £600,000 – and bosses have given up trying to claw the money back.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office failed to notice for seven years that it was paying too much overtime to almost 700 staff.

By the time the error was spotted, a total of £577,000 had been overpaid between 2008 and 2015.

The FCO wrote off £135,279 of the losses last year ‘because the cost of recovering very old and very small payments would outweigh the payments themselves’, according to Whitehall sources.

Mandarins tried to recoup some of the remaining cash but have now concluded that a further £ 321,858 is ‘unrecoverable’.

It means the FCO has written off £457,137 of the overpayments and got back only £119,863.

Details of the embarrassing error emerged in the department’s latest annual report.

It states: ‘The FCO made an administrative loss of £321,858 by overpaying staff overtime between April 2008 and March 2015.

‘ An error in the FCO’s payroll system led to an overpayment in overtime claims. This affected 699 staff in one pay band.

‘The error has been corrected and, f ol l owing discussions with HM Treasury, recovery action was initiated. The write-off represents the balance the FCO has been unable to recover from staff.’

An FCO spokesman said last night that the error affected only a small percentage of staff, and i t was ‘unlikely these staff were aware of the overpayment’.

He added: ‘Our audit department has investigated the cause of the error and new controls have been put in place to rectify the issue.’

‘New controls have been put in place’