In Australia, jury duty is treated as a type of community service leave under Fair Work rules. Employees, including casuals, are entitled to take leave for jury duty but are required to provide employers with notice as early as possible and evidence proving their attendance.
Fair Work also provides for 'make-up pay' for full- and part-time employees for the first 10 days of jury service. Make-up pay is the difference between the employee's base rate of pay for ordinary hours that would have been worked and what the employee has been paid by the court. An employer is not required to pay make-up pay until the employee provides evidence of the amount of jury duty pay received, or evidence that all reasonable steps were taken to receive jury duty pay.
For full details, refer to Jury Duty on the Fair Work Ombudsman website.
How to handle jury duty in Attaché Payroll
It is important to realise there is no one way to handle jury duty in Attaché Payroll. Fair Work Australia places some obligations on the employer, as mentioned briefly above. Other than those obligations, how you choose to handle jury duty will depend on considerations such as your employee types and your payroll setups.
Considerations
When considering your options for managing jury duty, you may wish to take the following into account:
Time spent on jury duty is counted as service, which means leave still accrues.
As a result, the time the employee spends as a juror needs to be recognised by an income pay element, otherwise leave will not accrue for leave tables set to calculate by hour.
If your leave tables are set to calculate by date then you do not need to enter an income line for accrual to occur.
Make-up pay is not included in Ordinary Time Earnings (OTE), so you do not need to pay superannuation on make-up pay.
See the ATO website: List of payments that are ordinary time earnings
Make-up pay does not have to be paid until the employee supplies evidence of the jury duty payment paid by the court (refer above).
Employer obligations will vary based on employee type (full-time or casual), so the same method cannot be applied across the board.
The court usually reimburses jurors on a per diem basis.
Based on these considerations, some options for handling jury duty are described below. However, these should be treated as examples rather than recommendations.
Option 1: Do not pay until evidence is received
If you choose to pay after the employee has provided evidence of the court payment received, set up an income pay element and process the timesheet as described below.
To set up an income type for jury duty:
Choose Setups, Payroll, Income Types, Maintain.
If your Super Guarantee pay element/s are set to calculate super based on % of OTE (that is, the Include in OTE check box has been selected in income, allowance and deduction pay elements) then:
Set Income Category to Ancillary and defence leave
Set Time Entry Method to Hours
Do not select Include in OTE.
If your Super Guarantee pay elements do not use % of OTE then you will need to alter the above method based on your payroll setups.
To process the above income element:
Choose Payroll, Transactions, Timesheets, Create or Modify.
Select Other Rate for Line Type.
Enter the jury duty income type code.
Enter the employee's normal hours for the day/s the employee attended jury duty. (Normal hours are the hours that would have been ordinarily worked if the employee had not attended jury duty.)
Calculate the rate to pay using this formula:
( (normal hours x employee's normal rate) — court paid amount) / normal hours
Example:
Julie attends jury duty for the pay period for 2 days. She normally works 7.6 x 2 = 15.2 hours for those 2 days.
Julie received $120 from the court for her service.
Julie's normal pay rate is $35/hour.
Applying the above formula, the rate of pay to use for the make-up pay is calculated as follows:
((15.2 x 35) — 120) / 15.2 = $27.11 per hour (rounded up to nearest cent).
Thus, the make-up pay rate is 15.2 hours of pay at $27.11/hour = $412.07 + jury duty pay of $120 =$532.07
Julie normally would have received 15.2hrs x $35/hr =$532.00.
Option 2: Pay upfront and deduct later
Other than make-up pay, as specified above, there is no requirement to pay an employee when they are absent from work while attending jury duty. However, the employer may at their discretion choose to pay the employee as normal and possibly deduct at a later date any jury duty pay received, once known. To deduct jury duty pay at a later date, you'll need to set up a deduction pay element.
To set up a deduction pay element for jury duty:
Choose Setups, Payroll, Deductions, Maintain.
Set Type to Value.
Set Tax Status to Before Tax.
Set Tax Certificate Code to Include in Tax Certificate totals.
Set Amount to $0 Variable.
Set Part of OTE to No.
Processing the deduction:
Simply add the deduction to the employee's pay and enter the amount the employee received, or part thereof to spread over multiple pays.
Option 3: Pay as normal
Some employers choose to simply pay as normal for a day or part day where the employee was absent for selection but was not empaneled. Others extend this to short periods of jury service.