GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE
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What is a corporate culture of compliance? A ‘corporate culture’ means an attitude, policy, rule, course of conduct or practice existing within the corporation. While few companies would have a policy or rule requiring underpayment, you can see how some companies could have an ‘attitude’ or ‘practice’ that tolerates underpayments or leads to underpayments. You can also see how many companies could be taken not to have ‘created or maintained’ an attitude, policy, rule, course of conduct or practice that ensures compliance. How can a company ‘create and maintain’ a culture of corporate compliance and what’s payroll got to do with it? The requirement to ‘create and maintain’ a compliant corporate culture means companies will need to take active steps to ensure wage compliance. This is where the laws have the potential to catch companies that aren’t taking sufficient steps to ensure they are paying their employees correctly. It remains to be seen exactly what lengths this will require companies to go to, but under the new regime, it’s clear that a company can’t simply just set up its payroll software and hope for the best.
To comply, steps such as the following would likely be needed, and this is where payroll professionals will have an important role to play: create a comprehensive payroll compliance plan, including conducting risk assessments to find potential vulnerabilities within your payroll system, addressing areas prone to error or oversight with tailored strategies to rectify and mitigate risks ensure payroll staff receive sufficient training in how to correctly pay employees conduct regular payroll audits to ensure compliance make sufficient effort to ensure awards, enterprise agreements and other legislative requirements are being applied correctly “ The requirement to ‘create and maintain’ a compliant corporate culture means companies will need to take active steps to ensure wage compliance. ”
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