University of Adelaide admits to $1.25m underpayment of 838 staff
The University of Adelaide says it discovered underpayments to casual staff after ramping up its auditing work. (ABC News: Marco Catalano)
In short:
The University of Adelaide has admitted to underpaying more than 800 casual staff around $1.25 million between March 2017 and May 2025.
The underpayments were uncovered after the university increased its auditing activities due to "the prevalence of underpayments" in the higher education sector, University of Adelaide vice-chancellor Peter Høj says.
What's next?
The university's audit is continuing and the higher education union warns the $1.25 million could be "the tip of an iceberg".
The University of Adelaide says it "deeply regrets" underpaying more than 800 casual academic staff around $1.25 million over eight years.
The underpayment, which the university said it uncovered after "[increasing] its auditing activities and monitoring of payments in response to the prevalence of underpayments in the sector", affected 838 staff members between March 2017 and May 2025.
The error is equivalent to an average of nearly $1,500 underpaid per staff member.
According to the university, the underpayment affected current and former academic staff who either held a relevant PhD qualification "and/or those nominated as the course coordinator for one or more courses at the university".
These staff members were "not paid the higher rates they were entitled to under the current enterprise agreement and/or predecessor agreements", the university said.
In an email to all staff on September 25, University of Adelaide vice-chancellor Peter Høj said the university "deeply regrets that the underpayments occurred and is remediating staff as quickly as possible".
He also said while the $1.25 million underpayment between March 2017 and May 2025 represented "less than 0.05 per cent of salary payments over that period", it was still "unfortunate and very regrettable".
University of Adelaide vice-chancellor Peter Høj told staff the underpayments were "unfortunate and very regrettable". (ABC News: Che Chorley)
"The university notified the Fair Work Ombudsman about the underpayments and is continuing to keep the regulator informed about the remediation progress and the range of measures it has implemented," Professor Høj wrote.
"We will continue to implement, enhance, and strengthen our processes and controls."
The university's auditing and monitoring activities are continuing, the vice-chancellor said, and "if any other instances of underpayments are identified, affected staff will be contacted by the university and remediated as quickly as possible".
The University of Adelaide has 4,115 full-time equivalent staff, including casuals, according to the university's 2024 annual report.
Professor Høj said "about 60 per cent" of those underpaid were former staff.
A University of Adelaide spokesperson told the ABC that impacted current and former staff "have been contacted and repayments have started".
$1.25m could be 'tip of an iceberg', union says
National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) SA division secretary Dr Andrew Miller noted that the university's audit was ongoing.
He said the $1.25 million underpayment "could well be the tip of an iceberg".
"Because it's only going after certain elements of compliance with the enterprise agreement, so there could be more," he said.
The revelations comes just before the newly merged Adelaide University opens its doors on January 1, 2026, following its merger with the University of South Australia.
The merger is backed by more than $460 million from the South Australian government.
Dr Andrew Miller says the university's audit could uncover more underpayments. (ABC News: Carl Saville)
Dr Miller said the new university "needs to end the scourge of wage theft once and for all".
"The new university needs to learn from its foundational universities about what not to do,"he said.
"We expect greater university governance … the least well-paid people in the university should not be short-changed."
Professor Høj said on Friday he was hopeful the university had audited the payment area where "the greatest danger was".
"We are continuing to look at areas in which there could have been underpayment," he told ABC Radio Adelaide.
"I would be very, very disappointed indeed if this turned out to be a tip of the iceberg — I hope we've seen most of the iceberg.
"There could be more underpayments uncovered; it would be wrong of me to rule that out."
Underpayments 'a breakdown in systems'
Professor Høj said $3 billion of wages had been paid out by the university over the underpayment period, meaning the university was "by and large doing the right thing by the vast majority of our staff".
He said the $1.25 million in underpayments was "a breakdown in systems, not a knowing action to underpay".
"I have seen absolutely no cases of people knowingly underpaying their colleagues," he said, adding that the cause was the complexity of the university's industrial instruments and payments being administered "at the very local level".
"It's also a breakdown in us having sufficiently broad knowledge amongst our casuals and particularly those who determine what they should be paid.
"I'm not trying to run away from us having to do it better, but I am trying to explain that we need as a university and as a sector to make it simpler both for those who pay and for those who work for us to know exactly what their entitlements are."
Professor Høj said an example of underpayment in this case would be a PhD student working as a casual tutor who then attains their doctorate but is not granted a PhD loading.
"Many of our casual tutors didn't know that provision … if they knew it, it was not captured by systems that transmitted it to the local … paymaster," he said.
Underpayment prevalent across the sector
The revelations come amid an ongoing Senate inquiry into university governance across Australia.
The inquiry's interim report last month called for tougher powers for the university regulator, saying poor governance was letting down staff and students.
The University of Adelaide's underpayment admission is the latest in a spate of university underpayment cases across the country, many involving much larger sums of money.
The University of Wollongong was last month ordered to repay $6.6 million in underpaid wages and superannuation to more than 5,000 staff.
Queensland's Griffith University was in June ordered to repay more than $8.3 million to more than 5,000 underpaid employees.
The University of Queensland, Australian Catholic University, Australian National University and Charles Sturt University have all been embroiled in multi-million dollar underpayment cases over the past three years.
The University of Melbourne had one of the largest cases, with a total underpayment bill of $72 million to more than 25,000 staff revealed last December.