Workplace Compliance Series

Workplace compliance is the set of legal duties an Australian employer owes its people, spanning pay and entitlements, work health and safety, conduct, privacy and record keeping. This series looks at where those duties quietly break down, and what the gap costs once a regulator or a court starts asking questions.

Compliance failures are rarely dramatic. They are ordinary gaps that nobody owned. Training that was never refreshed. A policy issued but never acknowledged. An incident raised in conversation and never logged. Records kept loosely because the business was small when the habit formed. Each looks minor on its own, and together they strip away the evidence an employer needs when a claim arrives.

Record keeping shows the pattern most clearly. Employers have to keep time and wages records for seven years, and the Fair Work Ombudsman notes that an employer who has not kept records, or has not made them available for inspection, may have to prove to a court that it did not underpay someone. The missing paperwork becomes the problem, not just the payment behind it.

The consequences have sharpened. Since 1 January 2025, intentionally underpaying an employee has been a criminal offence under the Fair Work Act, carrying penalties of up to 10 years imprisonment for an individual. Inadvertent payroll errors sit outside the offence, and a voluntary code gives small business a pathway, but the expectation that an employer can show its working has clearly risen.

Articles in this series cover the practical side of closing those gaps:

• building a workplace compliance solution that assigns ownership rather than relying on goodwill
• issuing current workplace policies and capturing acknowledgement that staff have actually read them
• understanding wage theft and underpayment risk in an Australian workplace

Obligations differ across states and territories and change over time, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice and check anything contentious with your adviser. The Fair Work Ombudsman guidance on record keeping is the place to start on the pay side. To see how the training half is handled, browse Sentrient’s compliance training courses.