Almost every week we hear new stories about wage theft or staff being unpaid. Many of our big companies have been fined for non-compliant payments to their staff. And now the watchdog has also been found wanting.
The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations who is “responsible for overseeing federal workplace and employment conditions had to pay about $200,000 to rectify a more than $60,000 underpayment of 99 staff.”
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Even the Department of Finance underpaid 60 employees over a 4-year period.
There are over 120 modern awards in Australia, plus the 1000’s of agreements, employment contracts and legacy arrangements.
Combine that with recent changes to standard conditions like how public holidays are worked and extra legislated hours such as Christmas Eve.
Plus, many workforces now receive additional items like flexible arrangements, Wellness Days, or changes to the working hours.
It’s no wonder companies can make mistakes. Especially if they are linked to aggregated or annualised salaries.
– 28,500 past and present BHP employees were owed $430 million in back payments for incorrect leave deductions over the past decade.
– Woolworths who identified a nearly $600 million shortfall in underpayments and has spent years identifying and remediating their affected staff.
Other major employers that have gone public with their pay errors in recent years includes Wesfarmers, Qantas, Commonwealth Bank, Super Retail Group, Michael Hill Jewellers and the ABC.
A lot of companies are using pay calculations and leave rules that applied under old awards, rosters and work arrangements. Some over a decade old and no longer applicable to their current operations or enterprise agreements.
And how these old payments and roster allowances were calculated are lost in the mists of time, or shoved in the back of someone’s filing cabinet who no longer works there. Often they had an arbitrary couple of percent added to “sweeten the deal” which can make back tracking or converting to new arrangements a nightmare.
So if the big players have issues with their payroll and leave systems, how confident are you about paying your people correctly?
And if you are moving your workforce to a new roster or set of work arrangements, have you correctly calculated all of the applicable allowances, premiums, public holiday and leave accrual rules?
We can help unravel the mess, so please reach out if you have any queries.
