Your team may call it a failed sync, stale record, tie-out break, or source-of-truth issue.We call it drift.
If you’ve ever closed a termination only to watch the benefits deduction keep firing, written a clawback memo, signed a restated quarter, or had your name on a control that “passed” before the auditor pulled samples — you know the pattern.
Six quiet failure modes. Five are honest error. One is the kind no one wants to sign their name to.
Drift isn't one thing. It shows up everywhere two systems are supposed to agree. Below are the patterns we keep running into. Each one costs real money. Each one has an audit consequence. And each one walks straight past the controls built to catch it.
International double-pay
Someone transfers between countries. HR updates cleanly. The new country’s payroll starts paying. The old country’s payroll never stops, because a transfer is not a termination, so no off-boarding trigger ever fires.
- · Country-siloed payroll reviews
- · Bank disbursement approvals
- · Payroll-to-GL tie-out (totals balance)
Promotion pay-rate drift
The promotion takes effect on the 15th. Payroll cuts on the 10th in one country and the 20th in another. Each one reads that date boundary its own way. Some pay the raise twice. Others skip a period entirely.
- · Monthly payroll review (totals balance)
- · Effective-date policy documentation
- · HRIS change-approval workflow
Terminated rep, CRM opportunities still crediting
A rep leaves. Their CRM login is disabled the same day. But 23 open deals stay assigned to them. Those deals close, flow into the comp engine, and accrue commission to someone who no longer works here. The monthly recon does catch it, usually at quarter end, after the accruals have already posted.
- · CRM user deactivation (opps don’t auto-reassign)
- · Payroll roster review (doesn’t see CRM)
- · First-pass commission calculation
+−Three more drift patterns we've catalogedHide additional patterns
Cost-center reorg → GL drift per employee
A reorg moves 80 people from one cost center to another. HR updates. Payroll totals still tie to the general ledger, so the close looks clean. But 7 of those people land in the wrong cost center, and their wages post to the wrong department. That department’s numbers are wrong. Nobody notices until someone asks why headcount cost looks off.
- · Corporate controller tie-out (totals balance)
- · Payroll review (roster is correct)
- · Departmental P&L (uses payroll as source)
Ghost employees & terminated-but-still-paid
Someone is terminated in HR. Off-boarding completes: the manager signs, the badge is revoked, the login is killed. Payroll was the last to know, or never knew. Direct deposit fires next cycle. Benefits deductions keep posting. The retirement match keeps accruing. It could be a process gap. It could be someone keeping a friend on the books. No local control can tell you which, and the fraud-risk walkthrough your auditor runs has to rule out both.
- · HRIS off-boarding workflow (completes cleanly)
- · Payroll roster review (employee “looks active”)
- · Bank disbursement approval (totals tie)
Schema Drift Detection
An export template changes quietly. A column gets renamed, dropped, or added. The automation keeps running against the old shape, so the check still comes back clean while the file underneath stopped saying what it used to say.
- · Scheduled exports
- · Column-based automations
- · Downstream formulas that still execute
Exposure figures are modeled, not measured: per-event bands derived from published correction-cost and wage research, sized against the drift types we see. The full derivation and its sources are on the pricing page.