Skip to content
All tabletop exercises
Third party·Starter·Executive audience

Your payroll provider goes down two days before payday

The prompt — read this to the room

It is Wednesday morning and 2,600 staff are due to be paid on Friday. Your outsourced payroll provider has been offline since last night. Its status page says "investigating a security incident affecting some systems" and gives no recovery time. Your payroll team cannot submit the final run, and the provider has the only copy of this month's calculated pay, tax and deductions. Social media already has posts from employees at other companies using the same provider. Your union representative has asked HR whether pay will arrive on time. The CEO wants a decision by noon.

Total duration
1 h 15 min
People to involve
6
Best fit
Manufacturing, Healthcare, Retail, Public

Who to involve

Most important first.

  • CFO / Finance
  • HR
  • CEO / Managing director
  • Vendor / procurement manager
  • Communications / PR
  • Legal counsel

What it tests

  • Choose a way to pay staff on time, or close to it, with known accuracy and tax trade-offs.
  • Communicate with staff early and honestly about pay.
  • Establish whether employee personal data was exposed and what that triggers.
  • Agree what a payroll continuity plan must contain before the next incident.

Outline of activities

  1. 1The outage: what you know and what the provider is not saying
  2. 2Options for Friday: last month's run, manual payments, or delay
  3. 3Telling staff and their representatives
  4. 4Employee data exposure and notification
  5. 5Payroll continuity plan

Run sheet (Pro)

The facilitator's timeline of execution, the detailed steps for running the session and the questions to ask each person.

Loading…

More third party exercises

🎉 New here? Use code WELCOME10 for 10% off any plan at checkout
Your payroll provider goes down two days before payday — Tabletop Exercise · PlayCISO