Ignoring a Fair Work compliance notice cost one restaurant $52,242

On 14 July 2026 the Federal Circuit and Family Court penalised the former operator of a Perth restaurant $27,935, and its director personally a further $5,587, for one thing: not doing what a compliance notice told it to do. Add the $18,720 in back-pay the court then ordered anyway, and the total is $52,242.

The back-pay was owed either way. The other $33,522 is what silence cost. GCH Vic Park Pty Ltd, which used to run The Globe Pan and Grill in East Victoria Park, had already been handed the chance to calculate and pay 18 cooks and food and beverage attendants what they were short. It didn't take it.

The short version: a compliance notice isn't a fine, and complying isn't an admission you did anything wrong. It's a written direction from a Fair Work Inspector to work out what you owe, pay it, and send proof by a stated date. Do that and the FWO can't take you to court over the breaches in the notice. Ignore it and a court penalty lands on top of the back-pay you still owe. This is general information, not legal advice.

What a compliance notice actually is

An inspector can issue one when they reasonably believe you've breached a workplace law, instead of heading straight to court. It's the off-ramp. Every notice has to spell out four things: how you breached the law, what you have to do to fix it, how long you've got, and how to apply to a court to have the notice reviewed.

The deadline is set in the notice itself, and the FWO's own worked examples run anywhere from 14 days to 28 days. Don't assume you have a month. If you disagree with the notice, you have to apply for a court review before the due date, not once it has lapsed.

Complying is four steps, and it's the last one people skip:

1. Read the notice properly and pin down exactly which employees and which period it covers.
2. Calculate what's owed.
3. Pay it.
4. Give the inspector proof of payment. Paying quietly and saying nothing is not compliance.

Before you start drafting an argument, know what an inspector is not allowed to weigh up: that the employee agreed to be paid less, that they owed the business money, that their performance was poor, or that you weren't aware of the applicable minimum rate. None of those are defences. Not knowing the award is specifically on the list.

Two details in that table are worth sitting with. The penalty didn't stop at the company: the director was penalised personally for being involved in the breach. And by the time it reached court the company was the venue's former operator. Selling up or closing the doors doesn't retire a notice.

In 2024-25 the Fair Work Ombudsman secured more than $870,000 in court penalties for one thing alone: employers failing to comply with compliance notices.

The three award errors that triggered this one

The venue came to the regulator's attention through a proactive auditing campaign, not a complaint. The inspector's belief was that 18 workers, variously full-time, part-time and casual, had been underpaid minimum rates, weekend penalty rates, and accrued but untaken annual leave on termination, between December 2021 and July 2023, under the Restaurant Industry Award 2020 and the National Employment Standards.

Start with which award you're actually on, because it changes every weekend number after it. MA000119 covers restaurants, cafés, reception centres and night clubs, but not a restaurant operating inside premises run by a hotel, a registered club or a fast food business. Those sit under MA000009, the Clubs Award or the Fast Food Award. Our rundown of the award mistakes that cost Sydney venues the most starts at the same fork, and the MA000009 levels guide covers the hotel side.

The weekend rate restaurant payroll gets wrong

The Restaurant Award has three penalty rate columns, not two, and the third exists purely for senior casuals. From the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026:

Read the Sunday row twice. A casual at Level 2 earns exactly the same rate on Sunday as on Saturday. Move that same person up to food and beverage attendant grade 3 and their Sunday rate jumps to 175% while their Saturday rate doesn't budge. Promote someone mid-year, leave the Sunday line alone, and you underpay every Sunday from that day forward.

The gap between awards is wider still. A casual cook grade 1 working an ordinary Sunday, on rates effective 1 July 2026:

$6.77 an hour apart. Same job title, same Sunday. The only variable is which award covers the building.

The one that only surfaces when someone leaves

Accrued annual leave paid out on termination is the quietest of the three, because it appears once per departing employee and then never again. Under the Restaurant Award, 17.5% annual leave loading is payable on untaken annual leave when employment ends, and the whole final pay is due no later than 7 days after the last day. Paying out the raw balance and forgetting the loading is the standard version of this mistake. Casuals don't accrue annual leave at all, so the exposure sits entirely with your full-timers and part-timers.

The records that let you answer a notice in a week

Most notices don't become court matters through defiance. They become court matters because nobody can reconstruct who worked what, eighteen months ago, from a roster spreadsheet and a shoebox of paper timesheets. You have to keep time and wages records for 7 years, readily accessible to an inspector and legible in English. That's the whole game when a notice arrives.

• Hours worked by every casual and irregular part-timer paid on time worked, plus the start and finish times of any overtime.
• Every penalty rate, loading and allowance paid, as a separately identifiable amount rather than baked into one blended figure.
• Leave taken and leave balances, and super: amount, pay period, date paid and the fund it went to.
• Whether each person is full-time, part-time or casual, their start date, and how the employment ended.

There's a sharp edge worth knowing. If you can't produce records and have no reasonable excuse, the burden of proof flips, and in a court wage claim you have to disprove what the employee alleges. Rounded clock-outs aren't a neutral habit either: they produce a record that doesn't match the hours worked, which is the same crack the Ghost Hour opens up in your margin. For scale, civil penalties currently run up to $21,840 per contravention for an individual and $109,200 for a company with fewer than 15 employees.

The Ombudsman has also said the quiet part out loud. Improving compliance in the fast food, restaurants and cafés sector is a stated priority, and this venue was found through routine auditing rather than a worker walking in the door. A clean set of records is the difference between a fortnight of admin and a court date.

Where Shiftly fits

You can't answer a compliance notice from memory. The operators who close one out in a fortnight are the ones who can already pull up who was rostered, who actually clocked on, what breaks they took and which rate applied, shift by shift, going back years. Shiftly is free workforce management for venues: rostering, GPS-verified timesheets and award-aware rate calculations, so you can check hours, breaks and rates against the roster before payroll runs instead of after a letter arrives. It's a calculation and record tool rather than a payroll service, and the numbers are always worth checking against the FWO's own Pay and Conditions Tool. It also fills the gaps: post an open shift and Shiftly's on-demand network offers it to nearby staff, so the roster fills itself instead of your Saturday going uncovered. Get started with Shiftly.

Frequently asked questions

How long do I have to respond to a Fair Work compliance notice?

However long the notice says. There's no single statutory window, and the Fair Work Ombudsman's own examples range from 14 days to 28 days, so read the date on the document rather than assuming a month. The clock matters for a second reason too: if you want a court to review the notice, you have to apply before the due date passes. Once it lapses without action, your options narrow to arguing about the penalty rather than the notice.

Is a compliance notice the same as a fine?

No. A compliance notice asks you to pay your own employees what they're owed, not to pay the regulator. An infringement notice is the on-the-spot fine, usually for record-keeping or payslip breaches. The Perth case shows how they interact: the $18,720 was the workers' money, and the $33,522 in penalties only existed because the notice went unanswered. Comply and provide evidence by the due date, and the FWO can't start civil proceedings over the breaches set out in it.

Can a compliance notice penalty hit me personally, not just my company?

Yes. Where a person is involved in a company's contravention, they can be taken to court alongside it, and that reaches directors, HR and other managers, accountants and businesses in the supply chain. In this case the director was penalised $5,587 personally on top of the company's $27,935. Current maximum civil penalties are up to $21,840 per contravention for an individual, and higher again where a court finds the contravention was serious.

What if I genuinely think the compliance notice is wrong?

Apply to a court for a review before the due date, and put the reasoning in writing. Worth knowing first is what an inspector isn't permitted to consider: an agreement to be paid less than the minimum, money the employee owed you, poor performance, or the employer not knowing the applicable rate. If your objection sits in one of those categories, it won't land. If it's a genuine dispute about classification, coverage or the calculation, that's the sort of thing a review is for.