Court orders nearly $24,000 - and pins the manager too, not just the company
A finance firm shorted three workers. A court just made the manager pay for it too.
A Melbourne finance brokerage and its manager have been ordered to pay nearly $24,000 in back pay after a court found the company underpaid three employees and dismissed one shortly after he raised questions about his pay and entitlements.
The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia entered default judgment against ANSA Finance Pty Ltd on May 27, 2026, declaring a string of breaches of the Fair Work Act and ordering $23,933.81 in compensation, plus interest and superannuation. The case was brought by the Fair Work Ombudsman.
The dollar figure is small. The lessons for HR are not.
The first is personal exposure. On the basis of admissions the respondents were taken to have made by failing to defend, the court declared that the company's manager was "involved" in the breaches under s 550 of the Fair Work Act - the accessorial-liability provision - and is therefore taken to have contravened those sections himself. That declaration covered every contravention except one. According to the judgment, the regulator's pleaded case was that he ran the operation: he hired the staff, directed their work, was responsible for paying them, and was a person responsible for terminating one of them. For anyone who manages a payroll or a team, that is the headline. A company structure does not automatically put a hands-on manager out of reach.
The second is timing. According to the judgment, one employee messaged the manager on May 10 and 11, 2022, raising that his superannuation had not been paid, and on May 11 also asked for the next day off as annual leave. He took that leave on May 12. He was dismissed the same day. On the regulator's pleaded case, accepted on the respondents' deemed admissions, the court declared that the company took "adverse action" against him - the Fair Work Act term for acting against a worker for exercising a workplace right - in breach of s 340, tied to the inquiries he had made about his employment and his leave. The sequence is the kind of thing that turns a routine separation into a contravention.
The underlying breaches were ordinary wage-compliance failures, and there were a lot of them. Under the Banking, Finance and Insurance Award 2020, the court declared that ANSA Finance failed to pay minimum hourly rates, annual leave and leave loading, personal leave, public holiday pay, and payment in lieu of notice on termination. It did not issue pay slips on time. It did not comply with a Fair Work notice to produce records. The compensation splits across the three workers: $14,336.69, $2,682.95 and $6,914.17.
There is a procedural cautionary tale for employers who think they can run their own defence. ANSA Finance never engaged a lawyer. The manager tried to represent the company himself, telling the court it had not traded for two years and had no funds to pay a lawyer, and pointing to the ill health of his mother, who is the sole director. The court refused. It noted that a corporation must be represented by a lawyer unless the court grants leave, that the request has to come from the company through a proper officer rather than a family member without a formal role, and that there was no evidence before it of the company's financial position. His "defence" was three largely blank pages marked "agree" or "disagree," never served on the Ombudsman and filed 114 days late. The court found it was not a real defence.
Because the company and the manager never properly engaged, the court ruled on the papers and entered default judgment. The judge was careful to record that there had been no hearing on the merits; the declarations rest on admissions the respondents are taken to have made by failing to defend.
Liability is settled, but the bill is not final. The court has listed the matter for a penalty hearing on August 24, 2026, where financial penalties on top of the back pay will be decided.
