Payroll compliance failures keep landing on payroll teams, but a former Deloitte director says accountability belongs at the top table
Australia's run of university wage scandals has produced multiple enforceable undertakings with the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), and one payroll executive says the pattern exposes a gap at the top of most organisations.
Brooke Hedger, chief revenue officer at Payroll Standard, argues businesses need a chief payroll officer – a C-suite role that owns pay accuracy from the first system decision to the final payslip.
The University of Queensland became the 15th university to sign an enforceable undertaking – a binding agreement with the regulator to repay staff and fix its systems – on 1 September 2026, after underpaying 16,382 staff about $11 million, according to the FWO.
That same week, Murdoch University's $4.9 million underpayment deal with the Fair Work Ombudsman added more than 2,100 staff to the tally. Across the wider economy, the problem is larger again, with the Fair Work Ombudsman's $453 million in recovered wages for 2025-26 covering more than 181,000 workers.
Hedger has worked across the payroll function in government, manufacturing, banking, retail and health. She ran global payroll for Cotton On Group across 22 countries, worked at St Vincent's Health Australia and spent three and a half years leading Deloitte's advisory practice in workforce and payroll solutions.
Why payroll inherits problems it does not create
Hedger said payroll is usually bolted on to HR or finance, depending on who sits in the CEO's chair, and neither home suits it. Finance treats it as black and white, she said, while HR treats it as a service function, yet payroll must be governed by process and compliance.
"When we look at my history and career, payroll inherits, they don't control. And I think that that's one of the biggest gaps that we have," she said.
Technology buying is a common example. Hedger said HR and technology leaders often purchase onboarding-to-payroll platforms before payroll is consulted, leaving teams to build manual workarounds and add headcount when integrations cannot handle the complexity.
"If you were going to go and buy an ERP, there is no way you would consider doing that without engaging your CFO. But you buy payroll technology based on HR who don't process payroll," she said, referring to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Australia's layered rules compound the risk. "When we're governing by state and then federal legislation, then we're governing by industrial relations from an EBA perspective, common law contracts, we've got so many options to get it wrong rather than get it right," Hedger said. Enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) set pay and conditions for a specific workplace, adding another layer for payroll systems to interpret.
Yet when errors surface, payroll takes the blame. "Someone made a decision about an interpretation upstream, put it into a system, and payroll inherited it, and now payroll's the problem," she said.
Who is accountable when payroll goes wrong?
Hedger said the case for a chief payroll officer rests on accountability. "There has to be a point in time where the board and the C-suite are responsible for the outcomes," she said.
She pointed to the personal exposure leaders now face. "If you're the CEO, and you will be personally fined for a payroll error, you can be personally fined as a payroll manager. Who's going to own that responsibility and accountability long term? There needs to be a Chief Payroll Officer to do that."
The Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) already allows penalties against individuals involved in a contravention, and since 1 January 2025 the new criminal offence for intentional underpayment of wages has applied to employers. The FWO has said honest mistakes are not captured by the criminal offence, though civil penalties can still apply.
"You need one throat to choke," Hedger said.
She also sees untapped value in the function. Hedger wants payroll to operate as an analytics hub, using pay data to influence decisions across the business. "Other functions aren't going to be invested in that because they're not the ones absorbing the work," she said.
Finding talent for a chief payroll officer role
The bigger obstacle may be supply. Hedger said she and a PwC partner discussed the idea years ago and agreed the market lacked the talent to fill it. She believes rising technology and AI adoption now makes the role harder to ignore.
"Payroll managers aren't necessarily the people that I would recommend to elevate to a chief payroll officer position. They haven't had broad business acumen to understand to be a commercial leader," she said.
The right candidate, she said, combines several disciplines, including industrial relations (IR). "That has to come from someone that has had both the payroll experience, the HR experience, the IR, and the systems experience all combined."
Hedger has tested that thinking in her own teams. She stopped hiring payroll specialists and recruited business analysts instead. "They're quicker with data, and then they can produce insights and trends that push back to the business to influence behaviour and culture," she said. She also recommends HR professionals spend at least six months in payroll to understand the end-to-end process.
Not every new C-suite role earns its place
Hedger acknowledged the risk of executive bloat as organisations consider roles such as chief data and analytics officers or chief employee experience officers. "Where it doesn't make sense to expand your C-suite is if the role is going to be no effect and no measure of success," she said.
Her test for any new seat at the table is strategic. "What's your roadmap? What are you looking for? What's your definition of success? What's your business strategy? Because if your business strategy doesn't exist, don't hire anybody."
