Queensland Health payroll debacle has a simple solution

It has been four years since I retired from my business, which used to employ over 2000 people each week, but I still remember the basics of running a payroll for that many people.

It was not as big as the 35,000 or so nurses the Queensland Health pays each fortnight but the principles are the same.

The Courier-Mail’s front-page article on Monday about a new dud payroll system demonstrates nothing has been learnt since the Bligh government health payroll scandal.

While these decisions are left to people with no management or real-life experience, they will end up with duds.

The estimates of the $1.3 or $1.4 billion to try to fix Health’s payroll mess means that about $37,000 to $38,000 has been spent on this project for each one of Queensland’s 35,000 nurses.

How much better if that money had been spent paying our nurses properly.

So what, if anything, can be done about it?

The solution is simple, but with lots of important people likely to lose their jobs if the system changes, they will all have no compunction in telling outright lies to defend their livelihoods.

However, Health’s ongoing payroll debacle was caused by the Bligh government allowing its Health HR people to negotiate the enterprise bargaining agreements with HR people from the Queensland Nurses Union.

This was the first mistake, because none of these people had nursing or management experience, they didn’t understand how health workplaces are supposed to work and, most importantly, they had no idea of the technical capabilities of payroll systems that were supposed to pay people according to the agreements they had negotiated.

If you go to your local computer shop, you can buy proprietary payroll programs such as MYOB and QuickBooks for less than $1000.

These programs can theoretically handle unlimited numbers of employees, but they only handle 10 or so payroll variables for each employee, such as ordinary pay, over time at 1.5, double time, meal and travel allowances etc.

Most businesses would use less than six variables.

The more variables that you have in an employee pay rate equation, the more complicated it gets and the more it costs.

Here is the core problem: Every Queensland Health nurse can have up to 26 variables in their pay each pay cycle. Sorry, it can’t be done.

Even worse, it doesn’t need to be done but more than $1.4 billion has been wasted in this pursuit of the unattainable.

Workplace arrangements need to be simple. People just want to be fairly remunerated for their work. Nurses are no different from anyone else.

To show you how simple it could be, Phill Tsingos, the Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland branch secretary, has a base rate of about $45 an hour.

When you add in all his penalty rates and allowances and then divide by the number of hours he works, he averages about $54 an hour.

That is an example of just two variables. An hourly rate times the number of hours. Phill would be quite happy just being paid like that.

That’s not to suggest everyone should be paid like that. The point is that it would not be too hard to redo all of Queensland Health EBAs facility by facility with no more than, say, eight or 10 variables in each pay cycle so that each payroll at each facility could simply be handled by MYOB.

The Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland is a competitor to the QNU, which caused this problem.

We think differently. We want to fix it by simplifying it. The only way to do that is to decentralise the system and involve the actual nurses instead of the HR people in the negotiations.

Savings will be immense. Our nurses would be better off and so would taxpayers who would start to see more bang for their health system buck.