Well, it looks like the recent declaration that the on-going problems with the Queensland Health payroll system that date back to March 2010 were finally over were a wee bit premature. According to the Brisbane, Australia newspaper Courier-Mail last Friday, a "technical fix" to the system resulted in staff being underpaid again for the last pay period. This story at ABC News reports that some "100 employees were underpaid by $50 to $210 a fortnight due to a technical glitch last week."
Queensland Health officials apologized - again - and called the latest bungle "unacceptable."
Another Courier-Mail story that was published yesterday also is not likely to make Queensland Health staff happy. The story reports that "three times more staff chasing down overpayments than those assigned to help workers left underpaid by its faulty payroll system."
This seems to contradict Queensland Premier Anna Bligh'sdecision just two weeks ago that the current focus should be on pursuing the AU $62 million in payroll overpayments until the underpayment issue was resolved.
The situation at Queensland Health just keeps getting stranger and sadder it seems every week.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.
