Westpac has repaid more than $50 million to employees following years of underpayment, the Fair Work Ombudsman has confirmed.
According to the Ombudsman, the underpayments occurred over an 11-year period due to failures in Westpac’s systems, governance processes, and compliance oversight. Additional issues included poor record-keeping, reliance on manual system adjustments, and input errors.
Employees had been underpaid across several entitlements, including casual loading, minimum wages for ordinary hours, higher duties and weekend penalty allowances, termination payments, and leave payments.
So far, Westpac has repaid over $50.26 million, along with nearly $9 million in interest and superannuation, to almost 47,000 current and former employees underpaid between January 2014 and February 2025. Individual repayments ranged from under $5 to as much as $56,085, with an average payment of about $1,000.
An additional $90,490 has been deposited into the federal unclaimed monies account for former employees who could not be located. Anyone can check whether unpaid wages are being held for them.
Westpac has also entered into an enforceable undertaking requiring it to make an $800,000 “contrition payment” to the Commonwealth Consolidated Revenue Fund.
Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said the enforceable undertaking was appropriate because Westpac fully cooperated with the investigation and showed a strong commitment to fixing past non-compliance and ensuring it does not happen again. She noted that Westpac repaid all amounts owed to employees it could locate, including back-payments going beyond the usual six-year limitation period. The bank has also committed to correcting any future underpayments in full, with interest and superannuation, and to implementing strict new measures to ensure accurate payments moving forward.
As part of the undertaking, Westpac will commission an independent audit to verify compliance with workplace laws.
The Ombudsman launched the investigation in December 2020 after Westpac self-reported the underpayments.
A Westpac spokesperson said the bank identified the issues during its own review in 2020 and acted immediately to correct them. “We’re genuinely sorry this happened. Paying our people correctly is a fundamental obligation,” the spokesperson said. “We have repaid all affected employees, including those who have since left the company, and we did not ask anyone who had been overpaid to return any money. We have also upgraded our systems and processes to better manage entitlements.”
