Payroll assurance: getting a clearer and validated picture through an independent review

As a result, a growing number of Australian organisations and their payroll teams are focused on reviews and any required remediation processes.

In this series, I’ll be looking at the stages of a payroll remediation project. In our experience, there are five significant stages for companies and their legal advisors to consider.

1. Risk Review
2. Recalculation
3. Issue rectification
4. Remediation for employees
5. Dealing with regulators

The triggers for each of these are different. In this article, I’ll discuss Risk Reviews.

Running Risk Reviews

Typically, these start by the Board or senior management looking at the press headlines and thinking:

‘Is this something where my organisation is at risk of non-compliance?’

The focus at this stage involves work by internal stakeholders, legal advisors and external advisors (that’s us):

Some considerations we work through

• Review of what Awards or Enterprise Agreements employees are covered by.
• Assessing if you have adequate processes in place to identify potential new Awards and ensuring changes made to existing Awards are correctly updated.
• Testing if the system is set up correctly. For example:
  • Does the time and attendance system record sufficient detail to capture the requirements of the Awards?
  • Does the payroll system contain the right paycodes required by the Awards? This is a simple gatekeeping test – if you don’t have the right paycodes then you know there will be an issue.
  • Are there manual processes and what controls are there over them?

Sometimes we’re requested to go deeper into issues, such as super guarantee or run some diagnostic analytics, such as our annualised salary BOOT test tool.

Think you’re at risk? Contact us to discuss your options. 

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