Singapore civil servants underpaid by S$10m due to HR errors

ABOUT 3,000 former and currently serving officers in Singapore's civil service were found to have been mistakenly undercompensated by a total of around S$10 million.

These individuals make up 2 per cent of the civil servants in service over the past two decades.

The civil service will make good the S$10 million shortfall in benefits to existing and past officers, said the Public Service Division (PSD) in a press statement on Wednesday.

Some individuals were either undercompensated or overcompensated as a result of errors in human resource (HR) records, which have since been corrected.

However, the civil service will not recover the excess payments made to overcompensated individuals, "given that these resulted from errors made a long time ago".

PSD said it discovered the errors while upgrading the civil service's HR and payroll IT systems. Internal audits and checks also surfaced miscalculations in some components of compensation and benefits.

A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU

Friday, 8.30 am

SGSME

Get updates on Singapore's SME community, along with profiles, news and tips.

Sign Up

The errors arose primarily because of human errors in data entry and coding of the systems. The systems also did not have adequate capabilities to detect errors.

Most of the errors involved inaccuracies in the Full-Time National Service (FTNS) duration records of male civil servants.

The civil service recognises the "fitness cut" period that a full-time national serviceman is eligible for, as part of the NS period recognised for the purposes of determining starting salary and service benefits.

This "fitness cut" period was erroneously omitted in the HR records of some men, which in turn affected their leave and other benefits, said PSD.

About 1,400 people were underpaid as a result of the FTNS inaccuracies. The majority of these men had one to two months of shortfall in their FTNS duration recorded. Areas affected included their retirement benefits, higher leave eligibility, long service awards, extended sick leave quotas and starting salaries.

The other errors pertained to inaccuracies in the IT algorithms used to calculate the medical leave wages for individuals on service-injury leave.

About a thousand civil servants were adversely affected by this. Their medical leave wages were wrongly computed based on gross monthly salary, because the correct formula based on average monthly earnings was not built into the systems.

There were also errors in the programme that computes the payments made by some pensioners when they retire from the civil service, in order for them to receive annual allowances. About 500 people - less than 2 per cent of the total government pensioner population - were adversely affected by this.

The civil service will reach out to all who were undercompensated due to the errors.

In-service civil servants will be notified by their respective HR departments between November 2020 and March 2021. The process of validating and making good the shortfalls will be carried out from now till mid-2021.

Those who have left the service will receive a registered mail at their last known address, as well as phone calls and home visits, from now till March 2021.

"We will like to assure both in-service and ex-public officers that there is no need to rush to contact us," PSD said. Those who are not contacted by March 2021, were not adversely affected by the errors.

Individuals who have queries can approach the HR departments of the government agencies they are working in or were employed with before they left the service. They can also e-mail their questions to enquiry_2020@psd.gov.sg.

PSD said it traced and validated the source of the specific errors in the IT systems once they were discovered.

The division also worked with agencies across the civil service to check through some 102,000 current and past records, which date back to the 1990s. It undertook additional checks and recomputed benefits as well.

The entire, extensive process took more than two years, PSD noted on Wednesday. "We will update all records to ensure accuracy going forward."

Loh Khum Yean, permanent secretary of PSD, said: "The public service is deeply sorry for the errors and inconvenience caused. We will make every effort to reach out to every adversely impacted individual to apologise for the error, explain the situation, as well as make good the discrepancy."

PSD has rectified the system programming and built-in error detection capabilities to flag potential errors and ensure that such inaccuracies do not recur, Mr Loh added.

Although statutory boards have autonomy over their own HR policies, PSD is working with them to also check and verify their HR records. This process is still in progress, and the statutory boards will similarly make good any errors if discovered.