3.0% increase to base pay rates from 1st July 2019
The Fair Work Commission has announced a 3.0% increase to minimum wages following its 2019 Annual Wage Review.
The new national minimum wage will be $740.80 per week or $19.49 per hour. The increase applies to base pay rates from the first full pay period starting on or after 1 July 2019. The change only applies to employees that get their pay rates from the national minimum wage, a modern award or in some cases a registered agreement. Most employees are covered by an award.
Casuals converting to permanent status
It is also a good time of the year to review if some of your casuals can be placed on permanent part-time or permanent full-time status. Fair Work Australia gives workers under 85 modern awards the right to request full or part time employment status after 12 months.
“If the casual employment turns out to be long-term in nature, and to be of sufficient regularity… then we consider it to be fair and necessary for the employee to have access to a mechanism by which the casual employment may be converted to an appropriate form of permanent employment” the full bench found.
Employment Law Breaches
Ignorantly underpaying employees can be both costly and embarrassing to your business. A Western Australian & Sydney based company found to have underpaid almost 99% of its staff had to send apology letters to every affected worker, as well as place a public notice in the Australian Financial Review to acknowledge and apologise for its employment law breaches. Workers were under paid $447,717. The underpayments resulted from failures to pay correct overtime and shift-work penalties, as well as part-time and broken-shift allowances.
Penalties
If you short-change an employee their leave entitlements in any way, you can face prosecution from the Fair Work Ombudsman or other state jurisdictions, depending on the type of leave involved and the state you operate in (even if your mistake was unintentional). Operating your business, could you afford to pay penalties up to $63,000? Penalties are not tax deductible and therefore the money has to come from somewhere?
Can you rely on your staff to have inputted the correct payroll award rates or calculated the correct entitlements? Our experienced Subject Matter Experts can ensure your payroll compliance as they have both knowledge and years of experience on establishing the correct awards.
Single Touch Payroll
Single Touch Payroll (STP) is a new way of reporting tax and super information to the ATO.
If you are using a solution that offers STP reporting, such as payroll or accounting software, you will send your employees’ tax and super information to us each time you run your payroll and pay your employees.
The information is sent to us either directly from your software, or through a third party – such as a sending service provider.
