Editor’s View: Qld Health payroll debacle needs answers

For taxpayers to be left footing the bill for another Queensland Health payroll debacle while sick patients struggle to get seen on time is simply unacceptable, writes the editor.

FOR taxpayers to again be left footing the bill for a payroll debacle within Queensland Health while sick patients are struggling to get seen on time within the failing health system is simply unacceptable.

Beyond that truth, the fact that there is yet another payroll fiasco in the department shows there are major systemic issues, and Health Minister Yvette D’Ath must step in to ensure they are quickly fixed – and find out and then reveal how much money has been wasted.

After all, it is not magic money. It is taxpayer money.

But don’t hold your breath. We reveal today that hospital workers across the state have been overpaid, potentially for up to seven years. And even worse, the department does not know how much money has been wrongly paid or how many workers are affected. They are completely in the dark.

Queensland Health Minister Yvette D’Ath. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

This inexplicable failure comes more than 10 years after thousands of Queensland Health staff were underpaid, overpaid or not paid at all when IBM was contracted to replace the organisation’s payroll system.

A KPMG audit in 2012 into the failed system found the department overpaid staff $112.3m – $16.5m of which was repaid and $3.3m waived, leaving $9lm outstanding.

The audit estimated it would ultimately cost $1.25bn to upgrade the failed system.

The scale of the department’s latest failure is at this stage largely known. But what we do know is that bureaucrats say they are conducting a “thorough audit of all historical day-worker entitlements”.

It is understood the audit is capturing all current and former day shift workers between 2014 and 2021 in areas such as security, food services, laundry and supply chain. All are believed to have potentially been overpaid. It is a mess.

Queensland Health is under extreme pressure. We know that. And while that’s not something particularly new or surprising – after all, health departments across Australia and the world are all under strain – Queensland does appear to be more in crisis point than others.

Ms D’Ath must start dealing with the issues plaguing her portfolio in a robust and transparent way.

That is because, frankly, Queenslanders are sick of it.

Women can’t give birth in major regional centres, elective surgery waiting lists have skyrocketed and ambulance ramping continues to be a massive problem, with the potential to cost lives.

There is no quick fix to any of this. But what Queenslanders do expect is for the government – via the relevant minister, in this case Ms D’Ath – to own up to the problem and outline exactly what steps are being taken to address it.

Instead, we get silence and – in many cases – a meaningless buck-pass to the federal government.

Ms D’Ath recently even bizarrely tried to claim in the case of the Gladstone maternity crisis that obstetricians were not needed in the majority of births.

The minister must get on the front foot with this latest payroll debacle, because when you look at it in combination with the other problems plaguing Queensland Health – well, it is nothing short of disgraceful. In short, money is being wasted while patients are struggling to navigate a failing health system.

This “administrative error” was surely preventable, and all eyes should have been on the payroll system after the IBM fiasco. The revelations today will be a tough pill for Queenslanders to swallow.

Minister D’Ath must not only expedite this “audit” – she must then come clean on how much money has been wasted.