FWO publishes underpayment remediation guide

Important heads up

If you make an innocent mistake, you are not going to be prosecuted for wage theft as long as you do the right thing and fix it and you put in place what you need to so as to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

However, there are substantial civil penalties for non-compliance with Fair Work requirements re wages and entitlements and it has been made very clear that “I didn’t know” is not going to be tolerated by the Fair Work Ombudsman as an excuse.

It also becomes a matter of public record and that can be extremely damaging to your brand both as a business and as an employer.

Two important guides

The Fair Work Ombudsman has published two really valuable guides for employers:

• A Guide to paying employees correctly and the Voluntary Small Business Compliance Code sets out 5 key areas for business with less than 15 employees to attend to and protect themselves from the risk of prosecution for wage theft – part of that is ensuring that you have someone internally or externally who can provide you with competent advice on Fair Work, minimum wages, modern awards, record keeping requirements and more;
• Their Payroll Remediation Program Guide sets out in great detail what they expect employers who have found themselves to be in an underpayment of wages situation to do – it does run to 42 pages so you might want someone who knows this stuff to give you the short version of it

What are the penalties?

They can be huge – even the lowest tier for record keeping and payslip breaches can be as much as $1,980 per breach for an individual and $9,900 per breach for a company. At the most serious level, they could be over $8,000,000 for a company.

Conclusion

No employer can afford to not have someone who they can rely on to provide them with the right advice on their wage and other employer obligations, whether that be through an internal HR resource, membership of an employer or industry association membership which provides such a service or through appropriately experienced and knowledgeable employment lawyers or workplace relations consultants like us.

Please call us on 0438 533 311 or email enquiries@ridgelinehr.com.au if you want to explore how we might be of assistance.