BHP Group Limited (ASX: BHP) the world’s largest mining company, says it will pay up to $280 million to current and former employees in Australia to rectify payroll errors.
The company said Thursday that in an internal review, it became aware that some workers had annual leave incorrectly deducted on public holidays since 2010. About 28,500 current and former employees will receive an average of six days of leave in compensation.
BHP also found 400 current and former employees at its Port Hedland operations were entitled to extra allowances because of a mistake in their employment contracts.
The company estimates the total cost to fix the issues will be $280 million before taxes, including extra payments to retirement funds and interest. The final cost will be included in BHP’s full-year results in August.
BHP president Geraldine Slattery apologized to workers for the errors.
“We are sorry to all current and former employees impacted by these errors. This is not good enough and falls short of the standards we expect at BHP,” she said in a statement.
The company has hired Protiviti, a consulting firm, to review its payroll systems. BHP will contact current and former employees soon and has set up a phone line and website to provide more information.
BHP also notified the Fair Work Ombudsman, Australia’s workplace regulator, about the issues.
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BHP is an Australian multinational mining, metals and natural gas petroleum public company headquartered in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
The company recently signed a deal with Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) to use artificial intelligence to improve copper recovery at BHP’s Escondida mine in northern Chile. This comes as a response to the company’s Copper Concentrator Challenge launched in September last year issued to increase copper recovery rates.
The partnership uses BHP’s new Azure Machine Learning operations platform and other Azure services like Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Data Lake Storage. These Azure services facilitate the efficient management of machine learning operations, data storage, data analysis, and the overall optimization of their mining operations.
