A former salesman at G4S has claimed there was a “culture” of not paying benefit-in-kind on company cars at the security company – and that he was told it would “ruin it for everyone” if he queried its absence from his payslip.
At the Workplace Relations Commission on Wednesday, G4S Secure Solutions (Ire) Ltd admitted it had been compelled to make a “substantial payment” to the Revenue Commissioners after discovering that “a number of employees” with company cars had built up liabilities.
The adjudicating officer in the case also criticised the company’s late filing of their submissions, adding that it “smacks of ambushing all parties” and telling their HR officer: “It may be the way things are done in your company – it’s not how things are done here”.
The allegations were raised by former business development manager Eamonn Young in his statutory complaint against the company under the Payment of Wages Act 1994, in which he alleges it was unlawful for the company to deduct a lump sum of over €7,347 from his final pay when he resigned – a deduction it said went towards the tax bill.
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“[The deduction] is not a huge figure to them, it was my bread and butter. I had to defer mortgage payments and household bills,” he said.
At Wednesday’s remote hearing, an adjudicating officer criticised the timing and content of the company’s documentary submissions before exercising his inquisitorial powers to demand a copy of a letter to the taxing authorities which the firm said was “sensitive”.
The complainant, Eamonn Young, said he questioned the absence of benefit-in-kind deductions from his pay on his €37,000 company car when he started in November 2018, only to be told by a sales department colleague: “Nobody pays it, don’t mention it, it’d ruin it for everyone if I did mention it.”
“I knew then and there this was a bad situation to be put in… I didn’t feel I’d any other choice but to keep my mouth shut,” he said. “It seemed to be a culture that nobody paid benefit in kind,” he added.
He said when management raised the issue in December 2020, he “immediately” stated his “disgust at the situation” and mentioned the conversation with the colleague when he started – but that he was told the other worker “wasn’t a manager”.
When he was offered a job a year later and gave his notice, he said his employer took a deduction of €7,347 from his final salary – a deduction he maintained was unlawful, as it had been made without agreement.
Adjudicating officer Conor Stokes put it to Mr Young that the sum was an accruing debt which he “should have been paying” to Revenue.
“I’m not disputing that it should have been taken all along – just the manner in which is was taken without my agreement,” said Mr Young. “I proposed they should write it off because as far as I was concerned this was not my debt to Revenue. Your employer is responsible for all this from you. When they were found out by Revenue they obviously needed to backfill that hole,” he said.
Neil Fitzpatrick, the company’s HR director, said the company realised during an internal audit that its payroll department had been given the wrong information about the company cars.
The result was a “substantial repayment for monies owed for benefit-in-kind for individuals either not paying the correct rate or not paying benefit-in-kind”.
Mr Fitzpatrick said it was down to an “admin error on the part of management” and that non-payment of benefit-in-kind was “not the norm in the company”.
He said the firm regarded the situation to be an “overpayment” of wages and that Mr Young was offered various options, including a 20% write off of the sum it was seeking from him – a position rejected by the complainant, he said.
Mr Stokes said copies of an employment contract and a company car agreement, which the firm said applied to the complainant, were “not signed, not dated”.
The tribunal heard the sum deducted from Mr Young’s final pay packet was composed of 80% of the benefit-in-kind bill which had accrued up to the point in 2020 when he refused a loan agreement offered by the company, plus the benefit-in-kind which accrued from then until the termination of his employment.
Mr Stokes said he was satisfied that the money deducted to Mr Young was paid to Revenue. He closed the hearing to consider his decision, to be delivered in writing to the parties and published later in the year.
