Ten Staff, Twelve Fees: ASIC Says Your Bank Charged Both Ends Of Payday

Yes, and a regulator has just put a number on one case. ASIC alleges around 42,000 Commonwealth Bank CommBiz customers, many of them small businesses, were charged about $8.5 million in bank fees nobody told them about, between November 2020 and May 2025. None of it is proven, and the bank disputes how parts of the claim are framed.

Read the worked example in ASIC’s statement before deciding it is somebody else’s problem. It is a payroll run.

Outstaffer sells employment and publishes what it charges, so read the rest as a disclosure of interest.

What ASIC says the undisclosed bank fees were charged on

CommBiz is the bank’s online platform for business customers. ASIC alleges its terms told customers they would pay one fee per Direct Debit or Direct Credit, for the payment to or from the third party.

ASIC further alleges the bank charged a second fee, never disclosed, for the matching movement of money out of the customer’s own account. The regulator calls these contra leg fees.

One payment. Two charges.

Am I being overcharged bank fees?

No media release can answer that for your accounts. It tells you where to look: take your bank’s published fee schedule and count the charges on one payroll run against the people you paid. ASIC alleges this gap ran nineteen years, because customers assumed the schedule was the whole of it.

Twelve fees to pay ten people

ASIC’s own example is worth reading twice. A small business paying the fortnightly wages of ten employees from two CommBiz accounts was charged twelve fees. Ten for the payments to staff, two for the money leaving its own accounts.

Twenty per cent more charges than people paid.

Run that fortnightly and it is 52 extra charges a year. The cost of paying people is not a line. It is a count, and the count grows with every pay cycle, currency and account you add.

The honest case for the bank

CBA says it identified this itself, reported it and cooperated. It stopped the fees in June 2025 and has waived them since February 2026. It has paid more than $26.4 million in remediation to roughly 93,000 customers, 40,000 of them small businesses.

That is about three times the sum ASIC has pleaded, though it runs from December 2006 against a pleaded window of four and a half years, so they are not like for like. ASIC’s release calls the program completed. The bank has apologised and expects to defend aspects of the claim. No court has tested it.

What the undisclosed bank fees cost per customer

Divide $8.5 million by 42,000 customers and it is roughly $202 each over four and a half years. Call it $45 a year. On a $3 million business that is a rounding error, and anybody selling this as the leak that sank your margin is selling something.

The other number is the one that should bother you.

Why nineteen years is the figure to sit with

ASIC alleges customers raised the issue from at least 2015, and that a 2016 internal audit found Direct Debit overcharging and required corrective action. On the regulator’s case the charging carried on anyway. A cost small enough that nobody disputes it survives a complaint, an audit and two decades.

Payroll holds a business’s most repetitive transactions. Same people, same accounts, same day, twenty-six times a year. Back office admin already costs more an hour than most founders have measured, and the charges underneath it are measured by nobody. It is the blindness that shows up when a lender decides which purposes your borrowing counts against.

Related reading

• Your card costs fall on 1 October. The bigger number did not move.
• What an Australian tech team costs per head is not the number in your budget

My position is that you pull one payroll run and one month of statements this week, and count the charges against the people you paid. Not because $45 a year matters. Because it tells you whether anybody has checked, and the answer is almost always no.

A better spreadsheet will not fix that. Every line of employing somebody has to sit in one place, which is what Outstaffer HR is for.

So, the real question. When did you last read your bank’s fee schedule end to end, and would you have known an undisclosed charge if a regulator had not pointed at one?