25 Jul, 2011 03:23 PM
The death of Central Coast man Robert Watson led to a Tax Office probe that found employers were bleeding workers of $1.3billion in superannuation entitlements.
Bricklayer Robert Watson died at a Central Coast construction site on March 29, 2007, one of more than 2000 Australians to lose their lives because of a work-related incident, injury or disease that year.
He was buried the following week after a funeral service at the Anglican church where, more than 26 years earlier, he married wife Kathy.
He died young, at 53, and left a devastated widow to cope with eight grieving children.
His name might have left the public sphere at that point, bar a mention four years later when a building firm and a company director were fined $174,000 over his death from a preventable wall collapse.
But when Robert Watson died, his employer was behind in its mandatory employee superannuation payments, denying Watson’s family a death benefit of up to $100,000.
What followed was a lesson in how putting a human face to a problem can produce significant change, and how the case of Robert Watson led the Australian Taxation Office to uncover $1.3billion in unpaid superannuation, some of it owed to the most vulnerable Australian workers.
As federal member for Newcastle Sharon Grierson said this week, after raising Watson’s case with the Tax Office four years ago: ‘‘That was the only good thing to come out of Robert Watson’s tragic death. It did shine a light on a problem. It put a human face on the complaints the ATO received about unpaid superannuation, and there was a response.
‘‘Sometimes that’s what governments and bureaucracies need to be reminded of.
‘‘At the end of all these laws we make are people.’’
By 2007 the Australian Tax Office was handling about 10,000 complaints a year from employees about employers who had not paid mandatory 9per cent superannuation contributions on their behalf to superannuation funds.
Many of the complaints were linked to failed companies. In some cases businesses were deliberately run into the ground. A majority related to small businesses. And as a federal parliamentary committee was told that year, in a large number of cases the employees who bore the brunt of the issue were already among the lowest paid in the workforce and in the least stable jobs.
Bricklayer Robert Watson died at a Central Coast construction site on March 29, 2007, one of more than 2000 Australians to lose their lives because of a work-related incident, injury or disease that year.
He was buried the following week after a funeral service at the Anglican church where, more than 26 years earlier, he married wife Kathy.
He died young, at 53, and left a devastated widow to cope with eight grieving children.
His name might have left the public sphere at that point, bar a mention four years later when a building firm and a company director were fined $174,000 over his death from a preventable wall collapse.
But when Robert Watson died, his employer was behind in its mandatory employee superannuation payments, denying Watson’s family a death benefit of up to $100,000.
What followed was a lesson in how putting a human face to a problem can produce significant change, and how the case of Robert Watson led the Australian Taxation Office to uncover $1.3billion in unpaid superannuation, some of it owed to the most vulnerable Australian workers.
As federal member for Newcastle Sharon Grierson said this week, after raising Watson’s case with the Tax Office four years ago: ‘‘That was the only good thing to come out of Robert Watson’s tragic death. It did shine a light on a problem. It put a human face on the complaints the ATO received about unpaid superannuation, and there was a response.
‘‘Sometimes that’s what governments and bureaucracies need to be reminded of.
‘‘At the end of all these laws we make are people.’’
By 2007 the Australian Tax Office was handling about 10,000 complaints a year from employees about employers who had not paid mandatory 9per cent superannuation contributions on their behalf to superannuation funds.
Many of the complaints were linked to failed companies. In some cases businesses were deliberately run into the ground. A majority related to small businesses. And as a federal parliamentary committee was told that year, in a large number of cases the employees who bore the brunt of the issue were already among the lowest paid in the workforce and in the least stable jobs.
At the end of their working careers, they were the ones who would most need every superannuation dollar. Robert Watson was one of those employees.
He had always been a bricklayer and loved the job. As his family said in an interview after he died, he would joke about leaving this world ‘‘with a golden trowel in my hand’’.
But raising a family of eight children on a bricklayer’s earnings was hard, and the five years before his death were the hardest of Robert and Kathy Watson’s marriage, his widow said.
The couple were living with family members at Watanobbi, trying to raise money for a house.
It was Robert Watson’s son-in-law Keith Foster who got him work at the Kooindah Waters residential golf estate at Wyong, after the two had worked together bricklaying for more than a decade.
Watson was employed by Gallim Constructions Pty Ltd, which was contracted by major construction company Mainbrace to supply and lay bricks on the site.
He had been working at the Kooindah project for a matter of weeks until March 29, 2007.
An agreed statement of facts tendered to a NSW Industrial Court hearing in February said he was working alone at 2pm that day, and wearing a safety helmet, when a free-standing 2.7 metre high partition wall collapsed on him.
He died at the site, despite the frantic efforts of other workmen, including his son-in-law, to save him.
Gallim Constructions entered voluntary liquidation in early 2008. Its sole director, Oliver Enright, entered a guilty plea to breaching a section of the Occupational Health and Safety Act after a WorkCover investigation.
Mainbrace also entered a guilty plea to a similar breach. Both parties had failed to ensure the wall was supported and braced, the industrial court heard.
The risk involved was foreseeable, and both employers failed to ensure there was a safe system of work in place for brick and block laying, Justice Wayne Haylen found.
He fined Enright $9000, and Mainbrace $165,000.
During a hearing day last year, Kathy Watson read out her victim impact statement to the court.
He had always been a bricklayer and loved the job. As his family said in an interview after he died, he would joke about leaving this world ‘‘with a golden trowel in my hand’’.
But raising a family of eight children on a bricklayer’s earnings was hard, and the five years before his death were the hardest of Robert and Kathy Watson’s marriage, his widow said.
The couple were living with family members at Watanobbi, trying to raise money for a house.
It was Robert Watson’s son-in-law Keith Foster who got him work at the Kooindah Waters residential golf estate at Wyong, after the two had worked together bricklaying for more than a decade.
Watson was employed by Gallim Constructions Pty Ltd, which was contracted by major construction company Mainbrace to supply and lay bricks on the site.
He had been working at the Kooindah project for a matter of weeks until March 29, 2007.
An agreed statement of facts tendered to a NSW Industrial Court hearing in February said he was working alone at 2pm that day, and wearing a safety helmet, when a free-standing 2.7 metre high partition wall collapsed on him.
He died at the site, despite the frantic efforts of other workmen, including his son-in-law, to save him.
Gallim Constructions entered voluntary liquidation in early 2008. Its sole director, Oliver Enright, entered a guilty plea to breaching a section of the Occupational Health and Safety Act after a WorkCover investigation.
Mainbrace also entered a guilty plea to a similar breach. Both parties had failed to ensure the wall was supported and braced, the industrial court heard.
The risk involved was foreseeable, and both employers failed to ensure there was a safe system of work in place for brick and block laying, Justice Wayne Haylen found.
He fined Enright $9000, and Mainbrace $165,000.
During a hearing day last year, Kathy Watson read out her victim impact statement to the court.
It prompted Justice Haylen to comment: ‘‘It is quite impossible to fully appreciate how Mrs Watson found the strength to read her statement to the court and it was clear that the sudden loss of Mr Watson remains a raw and ongoing source of distress, disbelief and disillusionment.’’
Her statement and those of some of her children showed how, even years after Robert Watson’s death, ‘‘their lives in almost every respect continue to be devastated and how the entire family has struggled, largely without success, to return to some form of normality’’, the judge said.
In his judgment Justice Haylen noted that Gallim Constructions paid $57,000 to Watson’s family in late April 2007, as an ex gratia payment in lieu of the death benefit that was not paid to the family because of Gallim’s unpaid superannuation contribution for Watson.
The ex gratia payment was negotiated by the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union. The union became involved after the family revealed it could not afford funeral expenses.
Sharon Grierson was another person made aware of the consequences of unpaid superannuation in the Watson case.
Less than a month after Watson’s death Grierson, who at that time chaired the federal parliamentary joint committee of public accounts and audit, raised Watson’s case directly with the then Australian Tax Office commissioner Michael D’Ascenzo during a committee hearing.
His office was ‘‘slightly below the task’’ on superannuation complaints, he said.
The committee questioned commissioner D’Ascenzo about unpaid superannuation again in September 2007 in its role, as Grierson noted, of being ‘‘the interface between the ATO and the people of Australia — not between the accountants, perhaps, and the taxation specialists, but between us and the people’’.
D’Ascenzo replied that his department had ‘‘certainly taken on board’’ the committee’s concerns about unpaid superannuation after the consequences of Watson’s situation were raised, and ‘‘we have increased the number of resources allocated to that task’’.
Her statement and those of some of her children showed how, even years after Robert Watson’s death, ‘‘their lives in almost every respect continue to be devastated and how the entire family has struggled, largely without success, to return to some form of normality’’, the judge said.
In his judgment Justice Haylen noted that Gallim Constructions paid $57,000 to Watson’s family in late April 2007, as an ex gratia payment in lieu of the death benefit that was not paid to the family because of Gallim’s unpaid superannuation contribution for Watson.
The ex gratia payment was negotiated by the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union. The union became involved after the family revealed it could not afford funeral expenses.
Sharon Grierson was another person made aware of the consequences of unpaid superannuation in the Watson case.
Less than a month after Watson’s death Grierson, who at that time chaired the federal parliamentary joint committee of public accounts and audit, raised Watson’s case directly with the then Australian Tax Office commissioner Michael D’Ascenzo during a committee hearing.
His office was ‘‘slightly below the task’’ on superannuation complaints, he said.
The committee questioned commissioner D’Ascenzo about unpaid superannuation again in September 2007 in its role, as Grierson noted, of being ‘‘the interface between the ATO and the people of Australia — not between the accountants, perhaps, and the taxation specialists, but between us and the people’’.
D’Ascenzo replied that his department had ‘‘certainly taken on board’’ the committee’s concerns about unpaid superannuation after the consequences of Watson’s situation were raised, and ‘‘we have increased the number of resources allocated to that task’’.
The Tax Office was using increased funds from that year’s federal budget to boost collection of unpaid superannuation debt, the committee was told.
Four years later, at the end of last month, the ATO reported its results.
It had uncovered $1.3billion of unpaid superannuation entitlements after checking up on employers over the past five years.
In 2011 the ATO has collected $152million in unpaid super and penalties from the smallest businesses, $138million from small to medium enterprises, $1million from the largest companies and $3million from non-profit organisations.
The trucking, auto repair and electrical services industries were the worst culprits for not paying their workers’ superannuation.
The ATO expects to investigate 17,000 complaints in the coming year.
Senior tax counsel Robert Jeremenko said the ATO was increasing its surveillance of employer-paid superannuation because of the federal government’s proposal to increase the compulsory super guarantee from 9 to 12per cent in 2013.
‘‘From an employer’s point of view they are breaking the law by not paying compulsory super,’’ Jeremenko said.
‘‘But for employees, it means that when they reach retirement they could have less money saved than they should have.’’
In a few cases, such as that of Robert Watson, an employer’s failure to pay superannuation each quarter can have a much greater impact.
‘‘A lot of people wouldn’t know, just like Robert and Kathy Watson didn’t know, that an employer wasn’t paying super contributions until it’s too late,’’ Grierson said.
She noted that penalties for late payment of superannuation were considerable, but said she remained concerned for employees when so many small businesses were struggling.
The Australian Tax Office’s response to the raising of Robert Watson’s case, and general concern about the issue of unpaid superannuation, was heartening, she said.
Four years later, at the end of last month, the ATO reported its results.
It had uncovered $1.3billion of unpaid superannuation entitlements after checking up on employers over the past five years.
In 2011 the ATO has collected $152million in unpaid super and penalties from the smallest businesses, $138million from small to medium enterprises, $1million from the largest companies and $3million from non-profit organisations.
The trucking, auto repair and electrical services industries were the worst culprits for not paying their workers’ superannuation.
The ATO expects to investigate 17,000 complaints in the coming year.
Senior tax counsel Robert Jeremenko said the ATO was increasing its surveillance of employer-paid superannuation because of the federal government’s proposal to increase the compulsory super guarantee from 9 to 12per cent in 2013.
‘‘From an employer’s point of view they are breaking the law by not paying compulsory super,’’ Jeremenko said.
‘‘But for employees, it means that when they reach retirement they could have less money saved than they should have.’’
In a few cases, such as that of Robert Watson, an employer’s failure to pay superannuation each quarter can have a much greater impact.
‘‘A lot of people wouldn’t know, just like Robert and Kathy Watson didn’t know, that an employer wasn’t paying super contributions until it’s too late,’’ Grierson said.
She noted that penalties for late payment of superannuation were considerable, but said she remained concerned for employees when so many small businesses were struggling.
The Australian Tax Office’s response to the raising of Robert Watson’s case, and general concern about the issue of unpaid superannuation, was heartening, she said.
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