A major Queensland university is repaying more than $8 million after admitting to underpaying thousands of staff for nearly a decade.

Griffith University short-changed 5457 current and former employees between July 2015 and June 2024, with total underpayments exceeding $5.95 million, according to the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO).

With interest of more than $1.55 million and around $830,000 in superannuation, the university will need to repay more than $8.34 million in total.

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Affected staff include full-time, part-time and casual workers across academic, professional, support, fitness and proctor roles.

They were spread across the faculties of Arts, Education and Law, Business, Health, and Sciences, at all six campuses, including the virtual campus.

According to the workplace watchdog, some staff were underpaid by more than $92,400, including superannuation and interest.

Griffith University reported the issue to the watchdog in March 2022 after uncovering underpayments under its enterprise agreements and two awards.

The causes of the underpayments have been traced to a range of issues.

The FWO said these included insufficient staff training, poor onboarding data collection, and outdated or inadequate payroll systems and checks.

There was also too much manual work, which led to mistakes.

The university also didn’t pay correct rates for some staff, failed to properly pay minimum daily hours, missed split shift and meal allowances for fitness employees, and incorrectly applied pay band increases.

Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said Griffith University had co-operated fully with the investigation and shown a strong commitment to fixing its compliance issues.

“Griffith University deserves credit for acknowledging its breaches and the underlying issues, and committing significant time and resources to put in place corrective measures that will ensure both full remediation of impacted staff and improved compliance for the future,” she said.

“The matter serves as a warning of the significant long-running problems that can result from an employer failing to have appropriate checks and balances to ensure workplace compliance.

“We expect universities to meet their legal obligations under their own enterprise agreements and underlying awards.”

So far, Griffith University has reimbursed 5226 employees a total of $5.83 million, not including superannuation and interest.

The FWO is also actively pursuing several other universities to enforce fair pay and workplace law compliance, including La Trobe University, University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, University of Technology Sydney, University of Newcastle, and Charles Sturt University.