Updated | November 2019
Auckland Council has completed the work necessary to recalculate employees and former employees leave payments and entitlements for the period worked between 1 November 2010 to 23 August 2019 according to the Holidays Act 2003.
Former employees, whose contact information the council still holds, are being contacted via letter, SMS and email between 25 November 2019 and 20 January 2020. If owed arrears they will be invited to register their claim at holidaysact.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz.
To set up and manage their claim, former employees will be required to provide the reference number they receive from the council, their IRD number, a form of identification and any documentation required to update their bank or change of name details.
If you are a former employee you can check if you are owed a remediation payment and register a claim at holidaysact.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz.
Current employees received final remediation payments on 21 November 2019, this is in addition to some interim payments made in May 2018 covering the full period 1 November 2010 to 23 August 2019.
Updated | January 2019
Following interim payments to current employees in May 2018, final payments for Holidays Act have been delayed to October 2019. The delay is due to the complexity of the payroll system changes, along with an extended unrelated upgrade to this system.
Following this (in November 2019) we will also make a full and final payment to former employees. The former employee payment process is a very involved. This means it needs to be a single payment after the system is fixed.
Auckland Council has started contacting employees who were underpaid as a result of an incorrect application of the Holidays Act.
The council will contact about 4500 current council employees to advise them of the issue and explain how pay will be rectified. Former employees will be contacted when the payroll system is fixed.
This follows a number of organisations across New Zealand incorrectly implementing the complex Holidays Act legislation, resulting in large-scale payment errors across several types of pay (annual leave, sick leave, bereavement leave, public holidays, and alternative leave).
Auckland Council Director People & Performance, Patricia Reade, says the council is doing all it can to ensure the issue is rectified.
“We are certainly not alone in discovering this issue with the Holidays Act. For example, NZ Police identified a $39 million underpayment affecting approximately 15,000 employees."
“For Auckland Council, the issues are complex and affect approximately 17,500 current and past employees who were employed by the council from 2010, including a wide range and large number of contracts.
“Working out exactly what we owed and who we owed it to was a huge and complex undertaking.
“However, we are committed to ensuring we do right by current and previous employees. The next step in the process will be to attempt to contact former employees who are owed backdated payments.”
Scope of Work
In 2016, following an audit of compliance, Ernst & Young (EY) was contracted to perform a comprehensive review of the council’s payroll system to:
- identify where underpayments had occurred (for both current and past employees). This calculation was performed at an employee level, encompassed present and past employees, and goes back to the date of amalgamating the various legacy councils in 2010.
- quantify the amount of underpayments as a result of non-compliance.
- assist the council in determining what changes are needed to ensure our payroll system and associated processes are correctly configured and/or amended to avoid these non-compliances moving forward.
This work included Auckland Council, Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development, Regional Facilities Auckland; Panuku Development Auckland and Auckland Council Investments Limited.
EY estimated liability of $18 million, to be included in the council’s 2016/17 Annual Report. This included detailed sampling and recalculating a wide range of employee payroll payments and applying this to the employee categories, determined by identifying employee working arrangements across the full population. The liability and process were audited by Audit NZ during their audit of the 2017 Annual Report.
Simpson Grierson was also contracted to perform ongoing independent legal reviews of the methodology and assumptions underlying the calculations done by EY.
EY and Simpson Grierson charged $2.1 million and $35,540 respectively.
Huge scale
Joanne Ogg, EY partner, says that the complexity of the work was unprecedented.
“EY are working together with a number of organisations to help them remediate their non-compliance situations," she says.
“In Auckland Council’s case, a number of factors made the remediation project different and far more complex than most organisations.
“This included the requirement to complete detailed work to understand the working arrangements, and payroll payments of approximately 17,500 current and past employees going back to the time of amalgamation in 2010.
“In order to gather that information, months of interviews and data analysis was required to identify and categorise employee working arrangements so we could apply the requirements of the Holidays Act as accurately as possible,” Ms Ogg says.
“This was particularly relevant because of the relatively high proportion of staff working non-standard hours, for example libraries, leisure, and parks staff, and the wide range of working arrangements in place.
“Further unique complexities arose because of the council’s amalgamation and subsequent structural, system and process changes. A number of methodologies have been developed to account for these complexities.”
Current employees affected received an interim payment in May 2018.
Work is ongoing to reconfigure the payroll system to address the compliance issues.
