Field notes › Running the business
Holding tax file numbers and bank details for a casual crew
A casual crew with steady turnover means a steady flow of new starters, and each one hands over the same bundle: a tax file number declaration, bank details, a super fund, a photo of their licence. In plenty of labour hire offices that bundle arrives by email, gets saved to a shared drive, is typed into payroll and then stays in several places for good. Nobody decided it should work like that. It builds up one new starter at a time.
Where this data actually ends up
Follow one new starter's details from the moment they hit send. The email sits in a coordinator's inbox, and probably in the mail app on their phone. The attachment gets downloaded to a laptop, saved to a folder, maybe printed for someone who prefers paper. Payroll gets a forwarded copy. If the worker texted a photo of a bank statement, that's on a work phone too.
Carry that across a busy season and the office holds bank and tax details for people who haven't worked a shift in a long time, spread across places nobody ever checks. Any one of those copies can do real harm if a mailbox is compromised or a laptop goes missing. The worker handed it over because they needed the job, and they are trusting you to look after it.
Collect it once, and not by email
The most useful change is to stop sensitive details travelling through email at all. Give new starters one place to enter them, whether that's your payroll provider's own onboarding, a secure form, or a workforce system that holds those fields properly. Tell workers plainly not to email their tax file number or bank details, and tell the office not to ask for them that way, because a worker will do whatever the coordinator's message says.
When details arrive by email anyway, and they will, enter them where they belong and then delete the message, including from sent items, the downloads folder and any phone it reached. It's tedious. It is also a lot less tedious than working out which of five copies was exposed after the fact.
The same goes for people who have left. Ask your accountant which payroll and tax records you need to keep, and for how long, then clear out the stray copies in inboxes and shared folders that were never the official record in the first place.
Limit who can see it, and know who looked
Most of the office never needs to see a worker's tax file number or bank account. Rosterers need to know who holds which ticket and who's free next week. Whoever runs payroll needs the bank details. Work out who needs each field and restrict the rest, instead of giving everyone with a login the whole worker record.
Knowing who looked matters as much as restricting it. If a worker asks who has seen their details, or something goes wrong, "anyone in the office could have" is not an answer you want to give. In Mustr, tax file numbers, bank and super details are encrypted individually on top of the encryption that covers everything else, and they stay hidden until the person viewing them passes a fresh two-factor check at that moment. Every reveal is logged. A rosterer can have a worker's record open all day without those fields ever appearing on screen, and each time someone does reveal them it leaves a record.
Check your obligations at the source
Australian privacy law, including the Privacy Act and separate rules that apply to tax file numbers, sets out how this information may be collected, used, stored and disposed of. Which parts apply to your business, and what exactly they require, depends on your circumstances. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner publishes guidance on both, and it's the place to check rather than a vendor's sales page or a blog, this one included.
A couple of habits make sense whatever your situation. Don't use a tax file number for anything beyond the tax and super purposes it was collected for, such as a handy worker ID in a roster spreadsheet, and read what the OAIC says is allowed. Decide in advance what you would do if a mailbox or device were compromised, including who needs to be told, and use the OAIC's data breach guidance to shape that plan before you need it.
There's more on how Mustr stores, encrypts and logs worker data on the security page, and if you want to see the reveal step for yourself you can book a demo.