The oldest presentation trick in exit packages isn’t lying — it’s labelling: money you’re owed regardless, folded into a single impressive figure and presented as the deal. The defence is an audit anyone can start and a review completes: separate the entitlements from the enhancement, because only the enhancement is buying your waiver.
The Entitlement Checklist
What’s owed before any agreement exists: notice at its full value — your contractual (or statutory minimum) notice period, worked, paid in lieu, or garden-leaved, with the audit question being whether the figure reflects salary and benefits and pension contributions through the period, or quietly just salary; accrued holiday pay — untaken leave to the termination date, correctly calculated on your actual remuneration, a line where errors are routine; statutory redundancy where the exit is redundancy — the floor that can’t be bargained below, mapped fully on the redundancy page; outstanding expenses; earned commission and bonus whose conditions are already satisfied — debts in substance, not discretionary hopes, per the earned/discretionary sorting; and pension contributions through the relevant period. Each item found inside the headline figure moves money from “layer” to “floor” — and shrinks what your waiver is actually being paid.
What the Audit Changes
Two things, both material: the valuation — the fairness comparison runs on the true layer, not the labelled total, and packages that looked generous sometimes prove to be entitlements plus a modest sweetener, which reframes every subsequent decision; and the asks — entitlement corrections are the least refusable requests in settlement practice, since the employer can hardly argue against paying what’s owed: the holiday recalculation, the notice figure completed with benefits, the earned commission included. They’re asks that concede nothing, offend nobody, and frequently fund themselves several times over — the routine first finds of every 48-hour review.
The mindset shift: itemisation is your friend — a well-drafted agreement labels every payment for what it is, and resistance to itemising is itself information. “What exactly is this figure made of?” is the single most clarifying question a package can be asked.
One impressive figure, unitemised? The audit takes a day: 01 5827148.