Apr 20 2010
By Candy Lashkari
Health worker salaries for the Queensland Health payroll have been going into bank accounts but have also been leaving a number of people unpaid. The Australian Services Union which represents the Queensland Health payroll staff is not too optimistic about the pay blunders being sorted out this pay cycle.
In fact Queensland health Director General Mick Reid has said that while everything possible is being done to resolve the issues with the new payroll system there will be more problems in the next pay cycle. This means that the health workers who were underpaid or unpaid in the last couple of pay cycles will be on tender hooks to see if their names feature on the pay roll this time.
Mick Reid said “We recognise there'll be a significant number in this pay period where adjustments are still not inputted (sic) into the system, and we're working on addressing those over the next one or two pay runs. We would hope we'd be getting back to business as normal within the next two pay cycles.”
That would mean that the pay roll will still be blundering for another month. On Tuesday Mr Reid is set to meet with the ASU to request 100 extra pay roll staff to help with the huge amounts of workload that the new system is generating.
The LNP's public works spokeswoman Jann Stuckey has written to Auditor-General Glenn Poole asking for a full investigation into the fiasco. "While the new payroll system has been rolled out first in Queensland Health, it will potentially affect many thousands more state public servants and we need to ensure the system will work properly before it's rolled out any further.... Queensland Health workers and indeed all public servants deserve to know what went wrong." said Ms Stuckey.