Opinion: $1.2b Qld Health payroll disaster still claiming victims

Over a decade since one of the biggest farces in Queensland political history, innocent victims are still suffering the fallout, writes Mike O’Connor.

One of my immediate family received a bill from Queensland Health last week for ­almost $4000, which came as a surprise as she had never been a hospital patient.

How, then, did she come to owe QH such a sum, a significant one to a young person paying rent, paying off a car and living a life?

Simple. She had worked as a casual employee in a clerical position for QH while she was a university student, a position from which she resigned some months ago upon graduating.

There was no detail accompanying the letter, just a demand for the money along with the offer of the services of a case manager “to assist with any questions or concerns you might have about these amounts, including how and when the overpayments occurred”.

I’ve got a few questions. How is it that 12 years after Queensland Health implemented a new payroll system, unsuspecting workers are still being paid incorrectly and then hit with ­outrageous demands for large amounts of money due solely to the towering incompetence of its bureaucrats?

Why is it that a system that was supposed to cost taxpayers $98 million has so far cost somewhere north of $1.2 billion and is still not working to the point that it is not capable of calculating employees’ wages?

What we got for our money is a payroll system that can’t do payrolls.

An inquiry into this debacle found that “the replacement of the Queensland Health payroll system must take a place in the front row of failures in public administration in this country. It may be the worst.”

Queensland Health’s largest hospital, the Royal Brisbane and Women’s

It was, the inquiry found, “a catastrophic failure”.

That was in 2013 and they still haven’t fixed it.

What, you might ask, would a multibillion-dollar private enterprise company, which found that its payroll system suffered critical flaws, do?

Would it just keep on using it in the forlorn hope that it would somehow some day fix itself? Would it adopt the “she’ll be right, mate” philosophy and look the other way?

How many other workers have been paid incorrectly over, let’s say, the past 12 months, and if the system can overpay then it would be reasonable to presume that it can also underpay.

What are the income tax implications for the hapless health workers who have paid tax on money that they are now being told they have to repay?

In attempting to defend this ongoing disaster, QH has blamed the complexity of the various wage and salary levels that apply within its workforce.

They have to be joking. This means that there is no one in the ­entire country who can be found to fix QH’s payroll system. The department’s attitude is that it’s unfixable and instead spends another mountain of money paying people to contact those who have been overpaid and trying to recoup the cash.

There are just over 13 million workers in Australia. How many of these, I wonder, got a bill for thousands of dollars last week for overpaid wages? Just those working for Queensland Health, I’d guess.

Mention debacle and Queensland Health looms large in the frame.

Health Minister Yvette D’Ath

It is one of the most crucial arms of the state government and the one that so consistently fails us.

There is ambulance ramping, which has become so common as to be barely worth ­reporting, a critical shortage of ­hospital beds and not enough ­hospitals into which to put them.

Doctors warn of looming crises while staff complain of bureaucratic stonewalling and understaffing.

What QH does have, however, is plenty of excuses. The population is growing – they thought it would shrink? The population is ageing – they thought we’d start dying younger?

Then there is that great catch-all, which is to blame everything on Covid-19, which is as convenient as it is unsupportable.

Successive health ministers have tried to drive the runaway train that is QH and all have failed, including the current incumbent Yvette D’Ath, who has never looked comfortable or in command.

That is not to say that QH does not, on occasion, spring into action.

It was amazingly quick to track down home quarantine dodgers, send staff knocking on doors and forcing apartment block managers to track the movements of potential virus spreaders in the pandemic.

When it came to enforcing what will eventually be seen as a gross violation of our rights, QH had no peer, but when it comes to paying its staff their correct entitlements, it fails miserably – and has been doing so for years.

I have a suggestion for Minister D’Ath. Terminate the contracts of the top 10 bureaucrats in Queensland Health if they haven’t fixed the ­system within six months.