66,000 NAB workers owed $169 million in mass underpayment

The National Australia Bank has formally conceded it underpaid 66,000 of its workers $127 million over 14 years, with some workers owed more than $87,000 each.

The bank will repay a total of $169 million to staff, including superannuation and interest. It will make a $2 million “contrition payment” to the Fair Work Ombudsman to effectively settle the legal side of the issue.

In a statement, the ombudsman said the issues stemmed from NAB’s failures to check it was paying staff at least the legal industry minimum under its pay deal with workers, to track staff hours and to correctly apply entitlements such as penalty rates.

The bank first reported the issues to the regulator in 2019, but failed to fully fix them and the problems continued until this year.

“NAB’s underpayments highlight the serious, long-running problems that can arise when an employer fails to coordinate key business functions to meet their workplace obligations, including payroll, industrial relations, technology, risk management, audit and legal,” said the ombudsman, Anna Booth.

Numerous other major institutions, including universities, law firms and retailers, have confessed to large-scale underpayments. NAB made $6.1 billion in profit on $22 billion in revenue last financial year.

The bank said it was working to find and repay all affected staff. It would invest in improving HR and payroll systems to stop another issue happening, it said in a statement. That work will then be checked by an external auditor hired by the bank.

“We take our payroll obligations extremely seriously as a basic element in employing people,” said NAB’s HR chief Sarah White. “We sincerely apologise for these unintended errors. We have and will continue to remediate anyone who has been impacted.”