New Laws: School Leaders Face Personal Liability for Underpaying Casual Staff

As of 1 January 2025, intentionally underpaying staff wages has become a criminal offence under new Fair Work laws. This means school leaders, including Principals,  can be personally liable for ensuring casual staff, including coaches and music tutors, are paid correctly.

For schools employing casual staff, the pressure to get payroll right is now higher than ever. If your school’s timesheet process isn’t robust enough, your leadership could face criminal charges, fines, or jail time under these new laws.

With the introduction of these new laws, intentional underpayment of staff wages or entitlements is now classified as a criminal offence. While honest mistakes can be corrected, negligence or failure to act won’t be excused. If school leaders fail to ensure staff are paid accurately and in accordance with the law, they now face the very real possibility of personal legal liability and heavy fines.

What This Means for You and Your school

If your school employs casual staff, such as coaches and music tutors, these changes directly affect how you manage timesheets. Casual staff often have irregular schedules, which makes timesheet management more complex and prone to errors. Even small rounding errors or miscalculations can quickly add up to significant sums over time  and now these errors could make school leadership personally liable.

The Need for Action

School leaders need to be proactive in reviewing your payroll processes. Do you feel confident that your school’s timesheet system is accurate? Are there any gaps in tracking the hours worked by your casual staff? With the new laws already in effect, the risk of criminal prosecution means that failure to act now could lead to personal consequences.

The Complexity of Casual Staff Payroll

For schools, managing different award rates for various casual staff members is already a complex task. Coaches, music tutors, and full-time staff helping out with weekend sports all come under different pay classifications, each with its own award rate depending on the hours worked, penalties for weekend shifts, and other considerations like overtime or allowances.

For example:

• Coaches working weekend sports may be entitled to penalty rates, which are higher than standard rates.
• Full-time staff who assist with sports or extracurricular activities on weekends may be paid at different rates, often with overtime or extra allowances.
• Music tutors, who often work irregular hours, could be on an entirely different pay scale depending on whether they’re providing group or individual lessons.

With paper-based systems or even manual spreadsheet tracking, this complexity increases the risk of human error which is a dangerous liability under the new laws. A simple miscalculation or misclassification could result in underpaying staff.

The Risk of Manual Timesheets

Managing timesheets for casual staff is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error, especially when you rely on manual systems. From paper-based forms to Excel spreadsheets, these outdated methods are inefficient and often lead to incorrect pay calculations.

Here are some common risks:

• Overpaying staff due to rounding errors or incorrect hourly rates being applied.
• Underpaying staff because certain hours are missed, especially if penalty rates aren’t tracked correctly for weekend or after-hours work.
• Human error when manually transferring data from paper timesheets to payroll systems, which is costly and time-consuming.
  

The complexity of managing different award rates, especially in a manual system, is a perfect storm for mistakes — mistakes that could cost your school thousands of dollars or leave school leadership personally liable under the new laws.

How Clipboard Can Protect Your School and Leadership

The good news is that Clipboard’s Timesheets Module can eliminate these risks with an automated, award-compliant payroll solution. Here’s how Clipboard helps:

• Award-compliant payroll calculations: Clipboard automatically applies the correct award rates, overtime, penalty rates, and allowances based on the type of session, time of work, and staff classification, reducing the risk of overpaying or underpaying staff.
• Integrated timesheets: Staff can only log hours for actual scheduled sessions. This prevents unverified hours from being entered, ensuring your payroll data is accurate from the start.
• Real-time flagging: If hours worked outside the scheduled session time are logged, the system automatically flags it for review. This feature has helped schools save up to $100K per year by preventing staff from overstating hours.
• One-click approval flow: Managers can review and approve timesheets quickly, ensuring accuracy with minimal effort. This saves hours of admin time, reduces double-handling, and helps your finance team stay ahead of payroll deadlines.
• Seamless payroll integration: Once timesheets are approved, the data can be easily exported directly into your existing payroll system, reducing the need for manual data entry and eliminating human error.
  

With Clipboard, your school gets confidence in payroll accuracy and peace of mind knowing that your timesheets process is fully compliant and auditable, reducing the risk of legal exposure.

Call to Action: Protect Your School, Protect Your Leadership

As school leaders, it’s vital that you take action today to ensure your timesheet process is compliant and error-free. The new laws have already taken effect, and the cost of not addressing this could be substantial, both for your school’s finances, and for your personal legal liability.

Now is the time to evaluate your current timesheet system and make sure your school is prepared for the new legal landscape. Clipboard Timesheets can help you make this transition easily, saving your school time and money while ensuring compliance with the law.

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Protect your school and your leadership from potential legal consequences.

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