Payroll woes may spread to other systems if incorporated: Auditor General’s report

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDJul 6 2010

There have been massive errors in the newly introduced payroll system of the Queensland health care staff since March this year. It left many workers under, over or un-paid for weeks. Following an enquiry the Auditor General’s report facts have surfaced. Now the Queensland Public Sector Union (QPSU) rejects the offer to change the payroll system of other sectors like police, ambulance and fire officers to this new computerized one so as not to risk the same bungle. The Department of Community Safety was next in line to take up the system but these problems have stalled all such plans.

According to Auditor General Glenn Poole yesterday, there may be more problems across government pay systems and many may be associated with fraud and other security issues. The report found that some systems used by CorpTech, the government's corporate IT agency, were due to become unsupported by 2013. It was thus felt that there was a “critical” need to consolidate CorpTech's systems. “The number of systems that need to be separately maintained by CorpTech increases the risk of security failures and data integrity issues. Such failures, if they materialise, could impact on the integrity of financial statements or the correct processing of payroll for public servants,” the report said.

The State Government still feels that a centralized payroll system has its merits. The Government announced that health payroll services would be split in to local hubs and CorpTech would be reviewed. The Opposition also claims that there have been warnings regarding this systems in as early as 2006, but these went largely unheeded. Spokesman Tim Nicholls said that there were “…warnings that payrolls are not secure, that information integrity is not protected”

QPSU state secretary Alex Scott expressed his concerns saying, “We think the risks identified in the auditor-general's reports are very low risks in terms of the future payroll risks for the State Government… We think there's a far higher risk involved in the actual change from one system to the other and we're gravely concerned that the Government needs to learn the lessons from the health debacle…We think that moving towards Community Safety as the next department up is a high-risk strategy which clearly failed in doing complex departments like health first…Community Safety is the second most complicated payroll system.”

Minister for Information and Communication Technology Robert Schwarten defended the Opposition’s accusations sating that warnings were not ignored. “To suggest that we suddenly drop everything and elevate this to a stage where we want to spend $1 billion on it, I don't think that's what taxpayers want us to do,” he said. He assured that that the fact that there has been no fraud shows that best was being done.

“The reality is that we can divert another $100 million out of the health system and put it into a system that is already working and is proving to work…That is the decision we haven't taken and obviously since 2006 we've had no major issues there…Centralizing is an efficient and cost-effective way of dealing with the business of government,” he said.