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Qld Health rolls out personalised payroll

After receiving a scathing report from the Queensland Auditor-General into the Queensland Health payroll disaster, Queensland Health Minister Paul Lucas has today announced that a personalised payroll system has now been rolled out across the state's facilities.
Written by Josh Taylor, Contributor and  Luke Hopewell, Contributor

After receiving a scathing report from the Queensland Auditor-General into the Queensland Health payroll disaster, Queensland Health Minister Paul Lucas has today announced that a personalised payroll system has now been rolled out across the state's facilities.

The original SAP-based payroll system, implemented in March, was found to have missed critical testing phases and lacked correct governance across the project.

An auditor-general's report into the payroll bungle found that a lack of appropriate testing and oversight led to some staff being underpaid, others not at all, and even a case where deceased employees were paid and put on active work rosters.

"When the auditor-general handed down his report in June we immediately adopted all of his recommendations, but identified a need to go even further," Lucas said in a statement.

The new system is a more localised approach to payroll, and seems to be in line with comments from Queensland Premier Anna Bligh that the government would move away from its "one size fits all" approach to IT services.

"Staff wanted to be able to speak to someone who understood their unique needs, had access to local information and were familiar with their rostering and payroll arrangements," Lucas said. "We said that after consultation with staff and unions, we would move to phase in a personalised, more localised health payroll model over three months — and that's what we have done."

"Of course, this isn't a silver bullet fix but we hope it will make a real difference to the day-to-day experience our hard-working staff have when they interact with payroll," he said.

The cost to fix the payroll system was estimated to rise to around $4 million.

Lucas also confirmed that the Queensland Government would respond to the payroll report from Ernst & Young and the PricewaterhouseCoopers review of the future of CorpTech and Shared Services at the end of next month after consideration by Cabinet.

"The government expects to respond to the reports by the end of November, following extensive consultation with unions, as well as directly with our staff," he said.

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