Health payroll debacle drags on

major union representing health workers has revealed the payroll bungle at Queensland Health involves about 7000 pay records and has flagged a difficulty in workers receiving their repayments due to “poor records kept” at hospital health services.

Last month, News Corp revealed the government department was auditing staff employed between 2014 and 2021 to work out how many employees were affected by the historical error to calculate shift penalties.

Thousands of workers across Queensland’s 16 hospital health services were embroiled in the payment failure due to a long-running error in classifying shifts as “day”, “afternoon” or “shift”.

As a result, some workers did not receive allowances based on their award.

In a note to members on Thursday, the Australian Workers Union said Queensland Health was committed to compensate workers for any underpayments.

“For some affected employees, early start and late finish payments will need to be deducted,” the union wrote.

“We have been advised that Queensland Health will not seek to recover any overpayments.

“In 2022 Queensland Health corrected this very same issue for over 2500 em ployees which resulted in salary adjustments including overpayments being made to workers in August 2022.

“A further audit has uncovered many more employees are impacted by this issue.

“Queensland Health will over the next three months review about 7000 pay records to determine the number of employees impacted, the payments as a consequence and adjustments to be made.”

The AWU told its members it was working to ensure underpaid workers received money owed by June 30 but said “the process has been made more difficult because of the poor records kept in the HHS (hospital health services).”