Australia’s Westpac to pay $5.5 Million for 8,000 workers because of staff underpayment

Australia’s second-largest lender, Westpac Banking Corp. (WBC.AX), announced on Friday that it would pay AUD 8 Million ($5.5 Million) including interest to around 8,000 employees who have underpaid their long service leave entitlements due to calculation errors.

The company blamed the methodology used which failed to determine long service leave entitlements in situations where staff members had changed their work arrangements, such as moving from full-time to part-term work. It also failed to send a payroll review to all of its employees.

“We apologise to anyone impacted by these errors and our priority is to make payments as soon as possible. For long service leave entitlements, different rules apply to different employees based on their employment history and work arrangements. Regrettably, our system didn’t correctly capture the right methodology every time,” Westpac’s Enterprises Services Group Executive Alastair Welsh said.

“We are putting in place measures to ensure employee long service leave is correctly calculated,” he added.

Some of Australia’s largest companies including Wesfarmers Ltd. (WES.AX), Coles Group (COL.AX), and Woolworths Group (WOW.AX) have detected errors that led to employee’s underpayment in recent years.