I had assumed responsibility for a process that paid a particular group of our employees outside the standard system (think expenses, as an example). I had to execute stored procedure to process the data and ultimately generate an Excel file that was submitted to the payroll company. The parameters for the various procedures were a bit clunky and it was all too easy to make a mistake – even with all the notes I had put together. Bottom line, I had not set the parameters correctly one month and it blew up the following month causing the payroll to increase by $750K, an increase of well over 50%. The file went through two other gatekeepers, neither of whom noticed the payroll had exploded, and the employees were paid. It didn’t even bubble up at the highest level (CFO) because the threshold for “whoa, something’s wrong!” was set at 1 million, so I was under the threshold. After discovering a problem, I was able to identify, dollar for dollar, exactly who was overpaid and by how much. Since they had already received nicely inflated paychecks, what I had to do was deduct the overage from their subsequent reimbursement checks over the next several months. Some people never had another submission so they never had their overage deducted and got a nice little windfall. When all was said and done, after about 10 months, Accounting gave me the OK to not try to recover the remaining overage amount. I’m no longer there (not for this reason!) and it’s been a while, but I think I was able to “recover” all but maybe $30K. Finance and Accounting, not to mention the CIO had every reason to hang me out to dry and did not. When they communicated to the employees, they blamed the problem on a system upgrade. 😀