Our Payslips Were Locked With Each Employee's Date of Birth

When we stopped printing payslips in 2021, the payroll team chose the simplest protection available. Each payslip went out as a PDF attached to an email, locked with a password, and the password was the employee's date of birth. Nobody had to be told it, nobody forgot it, and the service desk never had a single call about it. I came to it through a complaint. An employee had separated from her partner, who still used the family laptop, and her payslip, with her salary, her bank details and her national insurance number, had been opened in the shared mail client.