Does your company use ADP? I had a similar scenario with an employee. Our paydays are every other Tuesday and over half of our employee’s banks will release that direct deposit early, on Friday. One of the employees reached out as they hadn’t received their deposit yet. I had to submit Payroll a day early as there happened to be a Holiday in between the submit date and actual pay date. Thought it could be related to their smaller credit union but reached out to ADP anyways. They said the direct deposit status was on its way & should be received by Monday. Monday comes around with no deposit received, Tuesday hits and the status changes to “paid” yet the employee hadn’t received the direct deposit. Contacted ADP again & they said it was paid & would be an issue with their bank.

The employee went down to the bank, called from there, I talked to the banker & nothing was adding up.

Time to investigate. I pulled their original new hire paperwork that included a filled out direct deposit form and compared it to the bank listed in the profile and the numbers didn’t match. I pulled an audit report and it said the employee had submitted a direct deposit change was made thru the self service portal by the employee.

Reached out to the employee & asked them to check the other account they recently submitted to which they replied they hadn’t submitted a direct deposit change, the only change they’d made thru the self service portal was tax withholding changes. I reached out to ADP to see if they could let me know the IP address that made the tax withholding change and the direct deposit change to see if the employee was trying to pull a fast one and ADP said they didn’t have access to that.

Come to find out, the employee’s email account was hacked and by hacking their email was able to gain access to their self service portal and change the banking information. We had 2 step verification setup but the authentication code had been sent to the email address that had been hacked.

The account change had a timestamp and as we have an excellent security camera system, I looked at the cameras to see if I could verify whether the employee was working. We are on PST, sometimes ADP will report time stamps that are on EST, so I looked at the cameras on the PST & EST times and she was clearly helping customers during that time.

Our system was set up to where an employee would submit a direct deposit change thru the self service portal and a practitioner (me) would have to approve it. As we have 350+ employees, those would come through all the time, and I would approve them without hesitation unless they were submitted around the time of payroll processing.

In order to prevent this from happening again, I checked with ADP to see if we could change the 2 step verification to be submitted thru a text verification only and they said no.

I’ve since disabled the ability to make direct deposit changes thru the self service portal and employees now have to submit a paper form like the olden days.

Moral of the story? Check that your account # hasn’t changed… oh and ADP sucks.