​Queensland Premier to probe health payroll

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has vowed to look into suggestions there has been another payroll debacle in the state's health system.

Deputy Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington tabled an email in parliament on Tuesday warning of pay errors for nursing staff at Queensland Health.

"Payroll has alerted me this morning several documents we sent to them last fortnight were not updated in Workbrain (the pay system)," the email, signed by an acting nurse manager called "Drew", read.

"Can you please check you (sic) latest pay advice on streamline.

"If you think you have an error or missed payment, please come and see ... me."

Frecklington asked Palaszczuk when she was advised of the latest error.

"I'm happy to look in more detail about this email -- it is very generic," Palaszczuk replied.

"I will get advice from the health minister [Cameron Dick]."

Dick told parliament the email referred to the manual processing of a small number of payroll forms not being processed in time to be included in the pay run.

He said it wasn't a failure in the payroll system and only 15 staff were affected.

"This represents 0.016 percent of the 95,000 health pays generated each fortnight," he said.

Dick said staff received extra payments, worth a combined AU$6519.18, last week to correct the error.

Frecklington labelled the error "another Labor payroll failure", linking it to the infamous AU$1.2 billion Queensland Health payroll bungle of 2010, which left 74,000 health staff underpaid, overpaid, or not paid at all.

Last year, former Queensland Premier Anna Bligh admitted the Queensland government was at fault for the "catastrophic disaster" of the health payroll system in 2010, and it was not a failure of hardware or software.

"The single biggest failure of the project was failure around managing the program and governance of it," she said.

"There was no real clarity of governance. There was one part of the government that was responsible for whole of government IT in a shared service provider model, and then we had the line agency Queensland Health.

As a result, Queensland Health was led to believe that it was buying a one-for-one replacement of its previous system, Bligh said.

"We basically got the product we bought, but we bought the wrong one, or we bought one that was not fit for purpose."

Bligh added the government failed to take into account the complexity of the job, as the system was faced with handling almost 200 industrial agreements, which meant there were at least 24,000 possible combinations of allowances and conditions the system had to handle.

Bligh's confession came after former Premier Campbell Newman announced in December 2014 the state was taking legal action against IBM, the company responsible for implementing the then-new payroll system.

Newman at the time said the company had misrepresented its capability to deliver the AU$6 million contract on time and on budget. IBM won the contract to design and deliver a whole-of-government payroll system in 2007, but with the project plagued by delays and cost blowouts, it didn't go live until March 2010.

However, the state lost its battle last year, with Justice Glenn Martin ruling in favour of IBM, declaring that "on the proper construction" of the supplemental agreement, IBM was released from the State of Queensland's claims in its lawsuit.

The Queensland government was ordered last month by the Supreme Court of Brisbane to pay IBM Australia's legal fees stemming from the legal proceeding carried out against Big Blue. One legal industry source estimated the cost of the case to be as high as AU$3 million.

The Queensland government has decided to not appeal the court's decision. Acting Premier Jackie Trad said: "We think it's time to close the chapter and move on".

With AAP

Update 5.01pm 24 May, 2016: Added additional information by AAP that detailed how many staff were affected and what actions have been carried out to amend the issue.