Tesco has said it will reimburse 140,000 current and former staff, because it failed to pay them the national living wage.
The mistake is expected to cost the supermarket giant £9.7million after errors saw them miss out on money they were due.
“As
soon as our own review identified this issue we took immediate action
to resolve it and establish which colleagues are affected," UK chief
executive Matt Davies said.
“We’ve apologised to our colleagues
and our priority now is to talk to them about how this affects them
individually, and make any necessary payments."
(Photo: Getty) Tesco spotted the mistake after introducing a new payroll
system. All UK staff's pay was checked for the past six years as part of
their review.
It noticed that staff who had made voluntary
contributions for things such as childcare vouchers, pensions and cycle
to work schemes, might have missed out.
As as result, their pay didn't reach the level of the national living wage.
Next steps
Some staff missed out on money they were due (Photo: Getty) Tesco said it was is in the process of contacting affected
staff and that they will all receive their reimbursement payments by the
end of March.
It added it would be contacting former colleagues to arrange payments too.
"We expect payments to be up to £40 for the majority of affected colleagues,” Davies said.
The minimum wage: Your rights
Tesco fessed up as soon as it noticed, your employer might not (Photo: Getty Images) Bosses are currently legally required to pay workers the
following rates: £7.20 (£7.50 from 6 April 2017) if you're over 25,
£6.95 if you're over 21, £5.55 if you're 18-21 and £4 if you're under
18. You can find out the full wage rules here .
If
you’re working in a low-paid job, you can sometimes feel like your
rights only exist on paper. But there are ways you can make sure your
boss doesn’t wriggle out of his or her obligations.
“It is
completely unacceptable for any worker to be underpaid and everybody
should check their pay ahead of the national minimum and living wages
rising on 1 April," said Business Minister Margot James.
"Any worker who believes they may have been short-changed should contact Acas, the independent employment advice service."
I think I'm being unfairly paid - what should I do?
(Photo: Getty) If you believe you're being underpaid, you should seek
advice on the matter as soon as possible. You can find out what your
entitlement is using the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service's [Acas] Helpline Online tool.
Acas is a free body that provides information and advice to employers and employees on employment law.
If you find you are being unfairly paid, it is advised that you talk to your employer first, and try to resolve the issue.
If this doesn't work, you are within your rights to make a formal grievance to your employer.
Alternatively, Acas says a worker can make a complaint to HMRC who will investigate the complaint.
Gordon
Douglas Chalmers, 42, has been exploiting children online for more than
a decade by posing as the singer, police have said
Queensland University of Technology law lecturer Gordon Douglas Chalmers (Photo: QUT)
Police
in Australia say a university law professor who posed as Justin Bieber
online has been charged with almost 1,000 child sex offences.
Gordon Douglas Chalmers, 42, posed as the pop singer to exploit children online for more than a decade, police said.
The detective leading the case described the breadth of offences committed as "frankly horrendous".
Chalmers,
who worked at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, was
first detained by Australian police after a tip off from their
counterparts in Germany and the US.
Chalmers is said to have been impersonating pop singer Justin Bieber online (Photo: Getty) He was charged last November with offences including possessing child exploitation material and grooming persons under 16.
Opposing
bail for Chalmers at the time, police said he had "refused" to give
them access to his social media accounts and cloud servers.
But since then, further examination of his laptop has uncovered the full scale of his shocking offending, police said.
Since 2007, Chalmers has been posing as Justin Bieber on platforms including Facebook and Skype to groom victims, it is claimed.
Police said "a large amount" of child exploitation material was discovered.
Police say Chalmers used platforms including Facebook and Skype to groom his victims (Photo: Reuters) It is not known what countries the man targeted, but police
said the case demonstrated "the global reach and skill" that child sex
offenders possess.
The man has now been charged with a further
931 offences including, rape, indecent treatment of children and making
child exploitation material.
Detective Inspector Jon Rouse said:
"This investigation demonstrates both the vulnerability of children that
are utilising social media and communication applications and the
global reach and skill that child sex offenders have to groom and seduce
victims.
"The
fact that so many children could believe that they were communicating
with this particular celebrity highlights the need for a serious rethink
about the way that we as a society educate our children about online
safety.
"The breadth of offences committed in this instance are
frankly horrendous and I want to recognise the efforts and commitment of
the investigative team at Taskforce Argos to keeping children safe."
Chalmers is due back in court in Brisbane on April 6.
Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks on Tuesday published what it said were
thousands of pages of internal CIA discussions about hacking techniques
used over several years, renewing concerns about the security of
consumer electronics and embarrassing yet another U.S. intelligence
agency.The
discussion transcripts showed that CIA hackers could get into Apple Inc
iPhones, Google Inc Android devices and other gadgets in order to
capture text and voice messages before they were encrypted with
sophisticated software.
Cyber
security experts disagreed about the extent of the fallout from the
data dump, but said a lot would depend on whether WikiLeaks followed
through on a threat to publish the actual hacking tools that could do
damage.
Reuters could not
immediately verify the contents of the published documents, but several
contractors and private cyber security experts said the materials, dated
between 2013 and 2016, appeared to be legitimate.
A
longtime intelligence contractor with expertise in U.S. hacking tools
told Reuters the documents included correct "cover" terms describing
active cyber programs.
Among
the most noteworthy WikiLeaks claims is that the Central Intelligence
Agency, in partnership with other U.S. and foreign agencies, has been
able to bypass the encryption on popular messaging apps such as
WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal.
The files did not indicate the actual encryption of Signal or other secure messaging apps had been compromised.
The
information in what WikiLeaks said were 7,818 web pages with 943
attachments appears to represent the latest breach in recent years of
classified material from U.S. intelligence agencies.
Security
experts differed over how much the disclosures could damage U.S. cyber
espionage. Many said that, while harmful, they do not compare to former
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013
of mass NSA data collection.
"This
is a big dump about extremely sophisticated tools that can be used to
target individual user devices ... I haven’t yet come across the mass
exploiting of mobile devices," said Tarah Wheeler, senior director of
engineering and principal security advocate for Symantec.
Stuart
McClure, CEO of Cylance, an Irvine, California, cyber security firm,
said that one of the most significant disclosures shows how CIA hackers
cover their tracks by leaving electronic trails suggesting they are from
Russia, China and Iran rather than the United States.
Other revelations show how the CIA took advantage of vulnerabilities that are known, if not widely publicized.
In
one case, the documents say, U.S. and British personnel, under a
program known as Weeping Angel, developed ways to take over a Samsung
smart television, making it appear it was off when in fact it was
recording conversations in the room.
FILE PHOTO: People are silhouetted as
they pose with laptops in front of a screen projected with binary code
and a Central Inteligence Agency (CIA) emblem, in this picture
illustration taken in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina October 29, 2014.
REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo/Illustration
The
CIA and White House declined comment. "We do not comment on the
authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents," CIA
spokesman Jonathan Liu said in a statement.
Google declined to comment on the purported hacking of its Android platform, but said it was investigating the matter.
Snowden
on Twitter said the files amount to the first public evidence that the
U.S. government secretly buys software to exploit technology, referring
to a table published by WikiLeaks that appeared to list various Apple
iOS flaws purchased by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Apple Inc did not respond to a request for comment.
The
documents refer to means for accessing phones directly in order to
catch messages before they are protected by end-to-end encryption tools
like Signal.
Signal
inventor Moxie Marlinspike said he took that as "confirmation that what
we’re doing is working." Signal and the like are "pushing intelligence
agencies from a world of undetectable mass surveillance to a world where
they have to use expensive, high-risk, extremely targeted attacks." CIA CYBER PROGRAMS The CIA in recent
years underwent a restructuring to focus more on cyber warfare to keep
pace with the increasing digital sophistication of foreign adversaries.
The spy agency is prohibited by law from collecting intelligence that
details domestic activities of Americans and is generally restricted in
how it may gather any U.S. data for counterintelligence purposes.
The
documents published Tuesday appeared to supply specific details to what
has been long-known in the abstract: U.S. intelligence agencies, like
their allies and adversaries, are constantly working to discover and
exploit flaws in any manner of technology products.
Unlike
the Snowden leaks, which revealed the NSA was secretly collecting
details of telephone calls by ordinary Americans, the new WikiLeaks
material did not appear to contain material that would fundamentally
change what is publicly known about cyber espionage.
WikiLeaks,
led by Julian Assange, said its publication of the documents on the
hacking tools was the first in a series of releases drawing from a data
set that includes several hundred million lines of code and includes the
CIA's "entire hacking capacity."
The documents only include snippets of computer code, not the full programs that would be needed to conduct cyber exploits.
WikiLeaks
said it was refraining from disclosing usable code from CIA's cyber
arsenal "until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature
of the C.I.A.’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed,
disarmed and published."
U.S.
intelligence agencies have said that Wikileaks has ties to Russia's
security services. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Wikileaks
published internal emails of top Democratic Party officials, which the
agencies said were hacked by Moscow as part of a coordinated influence
campaign to help Republican Donald Trump win the presidency.
WikiLeaks has denied ties to Russian spy agencies.
Trump
praised WikiLeaks during the campaign, often citing hacked emails it
published to bolster his attacks on Democratic Party candidate Hillary
Clinton.
WikiLeaks said
on Tuesday that the documents showed that the CIA hoarded serious
security vulnerabilities rather than share them with the public, as
called for under a process established by President Barack Obama.
Rob
Knake, a former official who dealt with the issue under Obama, said he
had not seen evidence in what was published to support that conclusion.
The
process "is not a policy of unilateral disarmament in cyberspace. The
mere fact that the CIA may have exploited zero-day [previously
undisclosed] vulnerabilities should not surprise anyone," said Knake,
now at the Council on Foreign Relations.
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they did not know where WikiLeaks might have obtained the material.
In
a press release, the group said, "The archive appears to have been
circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an
unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of
the archive."
U.S. intelligence agencies have suffered a series of security breaches, including Snowden's.
In
2010, U.S. military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided more
than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield
accounts to Wikileaks.
Last
month, former NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin was indicted on
charges of taking highly sensitive government materials over a course of
20 years, storing the secrets in his home.
(Reporting by Dustin Volz and Warren Strobel; additional reporting by
Joseph Menn, Mark Hosenball, Jonathan Landay and Jim Finkle; Editing by
Grant McCool)
