A disability service provider on the New South Wales-Victorian border has back-paid staff more than $3 million after underpaying them for six years.
Community Living & Respite Services, which operates out of Echuca, Moama and the surrounding areas, reported its own non-compliance to the Fair Work Ombudsman last year.
The ombudsman found the organisation underpaid the minimum wages of 391 employees between 2015 and 2021 to the tune of $3.17 million.
The underpayment was blamed on a failure to implement an order by the Fair Work Commission from 2012, which resulted in the minimum weekly rates for workers in the sector gradually increasing.
Community Living & Respite Services is registered with the National Disability Insurance Scheme and provides disability and aged care services in the Victoria-NSW border region.
The organisation first identified its rates of pay were too low when a new enterprise agreement was being put in place.
It has now paid back current and former employees, on full-time, part-time and casual rates, amounts ranging from $15 to $34,874.
Better education needed
Community Living & Respite Services chief executive Leah Taaffe said the organisation's underpayment of 391 former and current employees was an administrative, unintentional error.
"We've done quite a bit of work to build a system where the chance of an error like that occurring again in the future is nil," she said.
"All staff were paid by August 2021."
Ms Taaffe said the award system constantly changed and could be confusing for people to understand.
"Part of the challenge is the complexity of the modern awards … it's a challenge for people to follow," she said.
"It's not an uncommon occurrence."
She said free, professional guidance was needed for community organisations.
"For community-based organisations, there's not great access to advice around what you should be doing and how you should be doing it," she said.
"People don't realise — because they're not experts in that area — that there are things you should be double checking."
Ms Taaffe said the non-profit organisation had worked with the Fair Work Ombudsman to put processes in place to ensure workers were getting properly paid.
"We've moved to the modern award," she said.
"We've improved our payroll system, we've entirely changed the structure of how our staff work.
She said a lot of work had been done internal systems and processes to ensure it didn't happen again.
Fair Work Ombudsman Sandra Parker said Community Living & Respite Services had made significant improvements to its processes since the underpayment, and it was strengthening its measures to pay workers properly.
"This matter demonstrates the importance of employers placing a high priority on having processes that will ensure they are always fully across workplace laws affecting their industry," Ms Parker said.
"In this matter, CLRS's failure to ensure it complied with a significant change in its sector has led to underpayment of basic employee entitlements and a big back-payment bill."
