Tasmania’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment has told staff it underpaid 908 current and former employees over a number of years. The department estimates the total at about $470,000.
The Community and Public Sector Union says the same number of workers, or more, were overpaid as well.
NRE secretary Jason Jacobi disclosed the problem in an all-staff webinar in June. “Put simply, some staff have been overpaid, some have been underpaid and some have been both overpaid and underpaid,” he said. He gave no figure for the overpayments.
How it happened
Jacobi said the department misunderstood an award entitlement relating to overtime. Because the shortfall built up in small amounts over consecutive pay cycles, most staff probably never noticed it. “No-one is to blame here,” he told them, calling it “a systematic administrative issue” that came from people misreading the awards and applying that to their time sheets over many years.
Initial auditing found 515 former staff and 393 current staff affected. For 744 of them the underpayment was under $1,000. Another 127 were short by more than $1,000.
Jacobi told the ABC the department found the errors through routine audits and business improvement processes. “The Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania is committed to ensuring all employees are paid correctly for the work they perform,” he said.
The union’s response
CPSU secretary Thirza White said the union was told the audit reached back five years, though the problem may be older. “It’s a great big mess that’s going to take quite considerable time and effort now to sort,” she said. “This is money that should’ve been in people’s pockets for the last five years in a cost of living crisis.”
White said the union was advised that underpayments and overpayments each came to about half a million dollars. The union has not been told how the department plans to handle those who were overpaid, and it wants the debts wiped. “No worker should be put into financial stress because of a problem with how their pay was processed over many years,” she said. “This is not something that any employee could have identified themselves. It’s a systems issue that’s the fault of NRE Tas.”
She added that the union could not fault the department’s process but had not been consulted, and would want to examine the award interpretation itself. She also tied the case to the state service’s plan to cut 1,700 public sector jobs by 2029-30, calling it “a real example of the cost of not investing in back-line functions.”
The department’s timeline
An NRE spokesperson said the overpayments are yet to be confirmed and will go through a separate audit. Fixing the underpayments is the priority, Jacobi told staff.
Changes to systems and processes are due to show up in the 29 July 2026 pay run. Information sessions for affected staff are planned for mid-July, and the financial calculations should be updated and validated by the end of August. Repayments, including superannuation and applicable interest, are scheduled to begin between September and December.
The department did not respond to questions about when it discovered the problem.
