National Australia Bank Ltd (NAB) is paying $127 million in wages to 65,999 underpaid workers as part of entering into an Enforceable Undertaking (EU) with the Fair Work Ombudsman.
The bank will also pay $34 million in interest and $8 million in superannuation.
It will make an additional $2 million “contrition payment” to the Commonwealth Consolidated Revenue Fund and commit to measures aimed at future compliance with workplace laws.
The Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) said in a statement that the contrition payment was the largest ever included in an Enforceable Undertaking.
The average backpay for each worker is around $1934.
The underpayments happened across all states and territories in Australia over more than a decade.
“Back-payments to impacted individual workers range from less than $5 to more than $87,000, including superannuation and interest, with an average back-payment of about $1934,” the FWO said.
“NAB first self-reported underpayments to the Fair Work Ombudsman in late 2019, after it became aware that it had made significant errors in implementing its then most recent enterprise agreement.
“This prompted NAB to conduct a broad review of employee entitlements that identified non-compliance issues dating back to 2012.”
The statement said that, years later, when implementing a new enterprise agreement in 2024, NAB became aware it had failed to identify and rectify its non-compliance issues adequately.
This had resulted in it continuing to underpay staff.
The FWO said NAB underpaid its employees a range of entitlements, including:
- Minimum wages for ordinary hours
- Payments related to penalty rates, shift loadings, and overtime
- Allowances such as meal and standby allowances
- Payments on termination
- Annual, personal and long-service leave entitlements
- Superannuation
The FWO said NAB had rectified the large majority of the identified underpayments, which occurred between 2012 and 2026.
Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said an Enforceable Undertaking was appropriate as NAB had cooperated with the FWO’s investigation, would be fully rectifying its underpayments, and had committed to improving its compliance and governance settings and controls.
“NAB’s underpayments highlight the serious, long-running problems that can arise when an employer fails to coordinate key business functions to meet their workplace obligations, including payroll, industrial relations, technology, risk management, audit and legal,” Ms Booth said.
“It’s particularly disappointing to see these types of large and long-running underpayment issues in such a well-resourced employer, including where it negotiated its own legally enforceable enterprise agreement terms but failed to make sure it had in place fully compliant payroll systems capable of giving effect to those terms before they became operational.”
Ms Booth said the FWO had helped recover more than $1.2 billion for workers from large corporates over the past five financial years.
