TL:DR Non compliance of recent Privacy and ATO Payroll legislation could mean signficant penalties for your business. You may have missed this some links are provided below

In recent weeks the Australian parliament has made for some titilating headlines regarding Bill Shorten’s (comments withdrawn here) and consequences of Barnaby not withdrawing at all. The news has been interesting but not very meaningful and unfortunately it has distracted us from some of the real work being delivered through the Parliament this year. A dangerous distraction if, as an Operations Manager you weren’t aware of two impactful changes in legislation. I’m talking about recent changes to the Privacy Law and to the ATO’s PAYG compliance.

Both will impact Small to Large Businesses this year. Both require genuine consideration,and some investment (if you haven’t done so already). Both will carry significant penalties for non compliance. And both have lacked the type of exposure that we should be seeing from the Parliament.

Personally I support the changes, they make sense and they will drive businesses to become more disciplined in regards to property we are stewards of, but don’t own. Like employees PAYG, Superannuation, and Personal Information (clients and employees).

Here’s some links to find out a little more

Single Touch Payroll

Single Touch Payroll reporting starts from 1 July 2018 for employers with 20 or more employees and 1 July 2019 for employers with less than 20 employees
Your payroll solution will need to be updated for Single Touch Payroll reporting.

When you pay your employees through a Single Touch Payroll-enabled solution you will be reporting payments such as their salaries and wages, allowances, deductions (for example, workplace giving) and other payments, pay as you go (PAYG) withholding and super information to the ATO at the same time.

The ATO web link provides some guidance on “How to Count Your Employees”. Seriously, that isn’t really the part that’s going to take the time. See the STP flowchart below

At IQ People we are compliant and if you do get stuck we’ll be able to provide outsourced payroll management for you until you get your investment completed. Eighteen months age we invested in our Single Touch System journey because we thought it made sense, some call that luck.

Notifiable Data Breaches

Effective last week is the Privacy Amendment (Notifiable Data Breaches) Act 2017  which introduces an obligation to notify individuals whose personal information is involved in a data breach. Penalties where breaches do occur may amount to $1.8M for companies. There’s been a lot written on this over the last year or so, but I was surprised it came up so quickly and without too much media fanfare. Over the last 18 months our team focussed primarily on reducing our attack surface, removing insecure file servers, removing data access through our website and selecting the right SaaS partners who manage this so much better than we ever will. All of our team use Password Safes that provide unique, complex passwords that are regularly refreshed.

At IQ People we were surprised with the legislation but we were prepared. This legislation isn’t about penalising businesses it’s about providing guidance to become better businesses.  Being a better business is more than just a tagline, it’s the care you put into other folks stuff, like their privacy and their money. The care you put in, when nobody is watching.

At IQ People, we’re not too ambitious. We like being small, we enjoy genuine conversations, and we like being careful, especially with other peoples property. We don’t make headlines, but we don’t get distracted either.  It’s just good business. IQ People focus on Office Administration Temp and Permanent placements in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, if you’d like to discuss Payroll Management or other staffing questions give Cheryl a call on 9259 0900