When a temp asks to change their bank account
Why a temp's bank change request is a classic payroll fraud route, and how a second-person check and a call-back keep wages in the right account.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Recruitment businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
On Wednesday afternoon an e-mail arrives at the payroll desk. It comes from one of your warehouse temps, or from an address that looks like theirs: "I've changed banks, please pay this week's wages into the new account below." The payroll administrator has forty other things to do before the weekly cut-off, updates the record, and on Friday the money goes out. On Monday the real temp phones to ask where their wages are.
Agencies are a favourite target for this kind of fraud, for reasons that are hard to change. Temps are many, they change often, the payroll team may never have met them, and pay goes out every week. This article explains how bank changes work in Achekam, what the system stops, and the human check that still has to sit on top.
Why a bank change request is the classic payroll fraud route
There are two common versions of the trick, and they need different defences.
From outside. Someone who knows a temp's name and the agency's payroll contact, often from a stolen phone, a leaked WhatsApp group or a social media profile, asks for wages to be redirected. Nothing about the payroll system is broken; the payroll officer is simply persuaded.
From inside. A person with access to payroll records changes a temp's bank account to one they control, ideally for a temp who has finished an assignment but has not yet been removed from the payroll. The wages keep flowing; nobody complains because nobody is expecting them.
The ACFE's Report to the Nations studies thousands of occupational fraud cases worldwide, including how schemes like these come to light and which controls work against them. It is worth an hour of any agency director's time before the next payroll review.
The temp submits the new account through self-service
The safest starting point is to stop accepting bank changes by e-mail or message at all. A staff member whose login is linked to their payroll record can use self-service to download their own payslips, apply for leave, and submit expense claims, detail changes or a new bank account. Each request goes to payroll to decide.
For an agency, that means:
- the request comes from inside the temp's own login, not from an address anyone can imitate;
- payroll sees it as a pending request, not as an instruction to act on;
- there is a record of who asked, and when.
Not every temp will have a login, especially on short assignments. For those who do not, write down how a bank change will be accepted instead, such as a signed form handed in at a branch with identity shown, and refuse every other route, however urgent the message sounds.
A second person verifies before it is paid
Whoever enters it, a bank account entered or changed by one person must be verified by another person before Achekam pays to it through the payment schedule or the bank file. That holds for self-service too: an approved bank change still needs a second person to verify it.
So two separate people stand between a request and a payment: one who decides the request, and one who verifies the new account. In a small agency, those two should not sit side by side and rubber-stamp each other. Give the verifying role to someone senior enough to delay a payment and confident enough to do it.
What happens to an unverified account in the payment schedule and the bank file
Each approved run has a payment schedule that downloads as a CSV. South African agencies can also produce a wages file for the bank, in FNB's import layout or as a column-mapped CSV for Standard Bank, Absa, Nedbank or another bank. Nigerian and Kenyan banks have no bank-file layout yet, so agencies there pay from the payment schedule.
An account that has not been verified is not paid through either of those. That is the protection working, but it has a cost: the temp's wages do not go to the new account on payday. Plan for it:
- Set a cut-off for bank changes, a day or two before the run is prepared.
- Tell temps that changes after the cut-off apply from the following week.
- Verify every pending change before the run is approved, not after.
Remember too that marking a run as paid in Achekam only records the fact. Achekam moves no money; your bank's own payment approvals are a further check on any payment that looks wrong.
A call-back check before you verify
Verification means more than looking at the form and pressing a button. A good call-back routine:
- Phone the temp on the number already on file, never on a number given in the request.
- Ask them to confirm the change in their own words: the bank, and the last few digits of the new account.
- Ask why. A new job, a new bank, a closed account. A vague answer is a reason to slow down.
- Check the account holder's name matches the temp, using your bank's account verification service where it offers one.
- Note the call on the request: who phoned, when, and what was confirmed.
Watch for the warning signs: urgency, a change requested days before payday, several temps changing to accounts at the same bank in the same week, or a change for a temp whose assignment has ended.
The same discipline protects construction firms with large site crews; ghost workers and bank verification on site looks at the inside version of this fraud. For the wider payday routine, see payslips and pay schedules for temporary workers, and for getting new temps onto payroll with clean bank details from the start, loading a batch of new temps into payroll.
Write your call-back routine on one page, name the person who verifies bank changes and a stand-in, and tell every temp on their first day how a bank change will, and will not, be accepted.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
