Two Banking Scandals in One Day: ASIC Sues CBA Over Hidden Fees as NAB Repays $169 Million to 66,000 Underpaid Staff

On a single Thursday morning in Australia, two of the country’s biggest banks were hit by two separate reckonings. The corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, filed civil penalty proceedings in the Federal Court against the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, alleging that tens of thousands of business customers were charged fees they were never told about. On the same day, the National Australia Bank signed a binding agreement with the Fair Work Ombudsman to repay about $169 million to roughly 66,000 current and former staff it had underpaid over fourteen years. Neither case involves the other bank, and neither regulator coordinated with the other. But the two announcements landed within hours of each other, and together they tell a single story about how the largest institutions in Australian finance can get the basics wrong for years before anyone outside notices. This is the story of the ASIC sues CBA NAB underpayment November 2026 double blow, and of what it means for the customers and workers caught in the middle.

1. Two Announcements, One Morning

The two announcements arrived through different channels, aimed at different audiences, and built on different laws. One was a court filing. The other was a negotiated settlement. What they shared was timing, scale, and a common theme: systems that were supposed to protect customers and staff quietly failed, and the failures went on for years.

1.1 The CBA court filing

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission, known as ASIC, commenced civil penalty proceedings against the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in the Federal Court of Australia’s Victoria Registry on Wednesday, 11 November 2026. The case, filed as VID1360/2026, was announced publicly on Thursday, 12 November. The bank, Australia’s largest, responded with a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange the next morning. The proceedings concern CommBiz, the bank’s online banking platform for business customers, and specifically the fees charged on direct debit and direct credit payments. ASIC alleges that the bank’s terms and conditions for CommBiz failed to clearly and accurately disclose all of the fees that business customers would be charged. The regulator is seeking declarations from the court, financial penalties, adverse publicity orders, ancillary orders and costs. No date has yet been set for a case management hearing, and no finding of liability has been made. The claims are allegations, and they have not been tested in court.

1.2 The NAB undertaking

On the same Thursday, the National Australia Bank, known as NAB, told the Australian Securities Exchange that it had entered into an enforceable undertaking with the Fair Work Ombudsman. An enforceable undertaking is a legally binding agreement in which an employer promises to fix a problem and accept supervision, rather than facing court action. The undertaking settles the question of NAB’s underpayment of staff, a problem the bank first reported to the Ombudsman itself in late 2019. Under the agreement, NAB will pay about $169 million in total: $127 million in unpaid wages and entitlements, $34 million in interest, and $8 million in superannuation, the compulsory retirement savings contribution. It will also make a separate $2 million contrition payment to the Commonwealth. The Ombudsman said the contrition payment was the largest ever included in one of its enforceable undertakings. The bank has already repaid at least $155 million of the total, leaving roughly $14 million still to be paid out to current and former staff.

2. The CBA Case: A 27.5-Cent Fee Charged Twice

The CBA case turns on a very small number. The fee at the centre of the dispute is 27.5 cents. It is the kind of amount that almost nobody checks on a bank statement, and that is precisely the point the regulator is making. Small charges, applied millions of times, become large sums, and the people paying them may never notice.

2.1 How CommBiz payments were supposed to work

CommBiz is CBA’s flagship online business banking platform, used by medium-to-large businesses and by many smaller ones as well. Its terms and conditions said that each direct credit or direct debit cost 27.5 cents, including goods and services tax. A direct credit is a payment made into an account, such as paying a supplier or an employee. A direct debit is a payment taken out of an account, such as collecting a regular payment from a customer. For a business that makes hundreds or thousands of these payments every month, the fees add up, but each individual charge is small enough to pass unnoticed. The terms, as ASIC describes them, told customers to expect one fee of 27.5 cents per payment. That was the deal as written, and that was the deal customers believed they had accepted.

2.2 What ASIC says went wrong

ASIC alleges that the bank also charged the same amount a second time, for the leg of the payment that touched the customer’s own account, a charge sometimes described as a contra leg fee. In other words, a single payment could attract two fees of 27.5 cents instead of one, because the bank charged for both sides of the transaction while its terms described only one. The regulator says the terms and conditions were misleading because they failed to disclose the second charge. ASIC Commissioner Alan Kirkland said in the regulator’s release that the bank had broken a basic promise to its business customers, and described the alleged conduct as a failure by Australia’s biggest bank to get the basics right over many years. ASIC counts about 2.4 million occasions on which the CommBiz fee pages were viewed, and treats each viewing as a separate misleading statement. CBA has said it self-reported the matter and cooperated fully with the investigation, but it does not accept some of the allegations. The bank has paused the disputed fees, changed its terms, and repaid customers, but the question of whether the law was broken will now be decided by a court.

3. Nineteen Years of Small Charges

The most striking feature of the CBA case is not the size of any single charge. It is the length of time the alleged conduct went on. According to ASIC, the misleading terms were in place from the launch of CommBiz in 2006. That means the problem, if the regulator’s case is proved, ran for about nineteen years before it was stopped.

3.1 The penalty window and the wider figure

ASIC’s case uses two different figures, and the difference between them matters. The figure inside the penalty window, the period the court can impose penalties for, is about $8.5 million. That covers roughly 42,000 business customers who were overcharged between 12 November 2020 and 31 May 2025. The penalty window opens exactly six years before the filing date, which is how the law limits how far back a civil penalty case can reach. But the regulator’s concise statement carries a wider figure as well: about $21 million across about 93,000 customers, going back to December 2006. Many of the affected customers were small businesses. In United States dollar terms, the $8.5 million figure is roughly $5.82 million. The wider figure shows the scale of the alleged problem over its full life, even though the court can only penalise the more recent part of it. The distinction is important, because it explains why the case matters even though $8.5 million is a tiny sum next to the bank’s profits.

3.2 The 2016 audit and the self-report

The case also raises a question about what the bank knew and when. ASIC’s material refers to complaints from customers and to a 2016 internal audit, and alleges compliance failures inside the bank. The bank lodged its first report about the matter with ASIC on 23 June 2025, and temporarily stopped charging the relevant fees in the same month. It amended the CommBiz terms in August 2025, so that the terms now say the fee applies to each debit and each credit, with a minimum of two per payment. Since February 2026, the bank has waived the contra leg fees altogether. ASIC said the bank has completed a remediation program going back to December 2006, paying more than $26.4 million to around 93,000 customers, including about 40,000 small businesses. The remediation is larger than the alleged overcharging figure because it includes interest and compensation on top of the fees themselves. The bank’s own annual results put the scale of its business in perspective: CBA’s statutory profit for the year to 30 June 2026 was $10.91 billion. Against that figure, $8.5 million in disputed fees is a rounding error, which is exactly why the regulator’s case is about trust rather than money.

4. What CBA Says in Its Defence

CBA has not denied the whole case. Its position, as set out in its statement to the stock exchange and in reporting of the filing, is more careful than that. The bank says it found the problem, reported it, fixed it and repaid the money. What it disputes is parts of ASIC’s legal case, and it expects to defend those parts in court while continuing to work with the regulator.

4.1 Self-reporting and cooperation

The bank’s strongest point is that it brought the matter to the regulator itself. CBA said it had self-reported the matter and cooperated fully with ASIC’s investigation. It paused the fees in June 2025, changed the terms in August 2025, and has waived the contra leg fees since February 2026. It has also completed a remediation program that paid more than $26.4 million to about 93,000 customers, a sum that goes beyond the $21 million in alleged overcharging because it includes compensation for the time customers were without their money. From the bank’s point of view, this is the behaviour of an institution that found a mistake and fixed it. The regulator, however, is pursuing the case anyway, which suggests that ASIC believes self-reporting and repayment do not settle the question of whether the law was broken in the first place.

4.2 The parts it disputes

CBA has said it does not accept some of ASIC’s allegations, and that it expects to defend certain aspects of the claim while continuing to engage with the regulator. The bank has not publicly set out in detail which parts it disputes, and the court documents will be the place where the argument is fought. One question likely to matter is what the terms and conditions actually said, and whether a reasonable business customer reading them would have understood that a second fee applied. Another is how much of the conduct falls inside the penalty window, and what penalty, if any, is appropriate given that the bank has already repaid customers with interest. The case is also the first major action under ASIC Chair Sarah Court, who took office on 1 June 2026, and reporting of the filing has described it as an extension of the regulator’s recent tougher stance towards major financial groups. That context suggests the regulator wants this case to send a message, not just to CBA but to every bank that writes its own terms and conditions.

5. The NAB Case: Fourteen Years of Underpaid Staff

If the CBA case is about customers being charged too much, the NAB case is the mirror image: staff being paid too little. The numbers are larger, the time span is long, and the people affected are the bank’s own workers, from casual and part-time staff to full-time employees across every state and territory.

5.1 How the errors began

The underpayments at NAB started around 2012. The bank first became aware of the problem in late 2019, when it discovered significant errors in how it applied its most recent enterprise agreement, the negotiated pay deal that sets wages and conditions for staff. It reported the underpayments to the Fair Work Ombudsman itself. An internal review found that the problems stretched back to 2012, caused by record-keeping errors and by outdated payroll technology that had been transferred across systems without being properly checked. The breaches covered parts of the National Employment Standards, the minimum legal entitlements for Australian workers, and four successive NAB enterprise agreements, from 2011, 2014, 2016 and 2024. The failures were mundane rather than dramatic: the bank did not properly check that staff were paid at least the legal industry minimum, did not track hours correctly, and did not apply entitlements such as penalty rates, the higher pay rates for weekend, evening and public holiday work. The affected staff worked across a wide range of personal and business banking roles.

5.2 Why they kept going until 2026

The most damning part of the NAB story is not that the errors began, but that they continued. A further review conducted in 2024 found that employees were still being underpaid, because the underlying issues had not been fully resolved. The problems continued until this year, 2026, seven years after the bank first reported them to the regulator. Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said the case highlighted serious issues when an employer fails to coordinate key business functions to meet its workplace obligations, specifically naming payroll, industrial relations, technology, risk management, audit and legal. In other words, the problem was not one broken system but several, and nobody joined them up. NAB’s human resources chief, Sarah White, said the bank took its payroll obligations extremely seriously and apologised for what she described as unintended errors. The bank said it was working to find and repay all affected staff, and would invest in improving its human resources and payroll systems, with the work to be checked by an external auditor.

6. The Bill: $169 Million and a Record Penalty

The final bill for NAB’s underpayments is about $169 million, and it is made up of several parts. The size of the bill is striking, but so is the range of individual payments, which runs from a few dollars to more than $87,000. For some workers, the money is trivial. For others, it is life-changing.

6.1 Breaking down the numbers

The total of about $169 million is made up of $127 million in unpaid wages and entitlements, $34 million in interest, and $8 million in superannuation. The underpayments affected 65,999 current and former employees, a figure that most coverage rounds to 66,000. Individual back-payments range from less than $5 to more than $87,000, including superannuation and interest, with an average back payment of about $1,900. The bank has already repaid at least $155 million, which includes more than $120 million in unpaid wages and entitlements, $25 million in interest and more than $8 million in superannuation. That leaves roughly $14 million still to be paid out. The bank, which ranks third in size behind the Commonwealth Bank and Westpac, reported a net profit of $6.14 billion in 2026, on figures revealed in November. Set against that profit, the $169 million bill is about two and three-quarter per cent of a single year’s earnings. NAB had also warned investors of about $130 million in payroll review and remediation costs for the 2025 financial year. The numbers are large in absolute terms, but small beside the bank’s profits, which is why the Ombudsman’s response has focused on the systems that failed rather than on the money alone.

6.2 The $2 million contrition payment

On top of the $169 million, NAB will make a $2 million contrition payment to the Commonwealth, the federal government. The Fair Work Ombudsman said it was the largest contrition payment ever included in one of its enforceable undertakings. A contrition payment is not compensation to workers. It is a payment that signals the employer accepts that what happened was wrong, and it goes to the government rather than to the people who were underpaid. Its size matters less than its record status, which the Ombudsman is using to make a point. The enforceable undertaking also requires NAB to have an independent audit of its new payroll platform, and to report regularly on compliance to its board. The undertaking will be supervised, which means the bank cannot simply pay the money and move on. It must show, over time, that the systems that caused the problem have actually been fixed.

7. A Pattern, Not a Coincidence

Two banks, two regulators, two different laws, one morning. It would be easy to call that a coincidence, and in one sense it is: ASIC and the Fair Work Ombudsman run separate processes, and neither timed its announcement to match the other. But the two cases share a deeper pattern, and that pattern is what makes the day significant rather than merely busy.

7.1 The Royal Commission’s long shadow

Australia has been here before. The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, which reported in 2019, found widespread misconduct across the country’s banks, including fees charged for services that were never provided and customers being charged when they should not have been. The Commission’s findings led to new laws, new enforcement powers, and a wave of remediation programs in which banks repaid billions of dollars to customers. The CBA and NAB cases announced on 12 November 2026 are not Royal Commission cases. They are new matters, arising from conduct that mostly happened after the Commission reported. But they echo its findings in an uncomfortable way. In both cases, the problem was discovered by the bank itself, reported to the regulator, and then took years to fix. In both cases, the sums involved were small beside the banks’ profits, and large beside the lives of the people affected. And in both cases, the root cause was not a single act of dishonesty but a system that nobody checked properly: terms and conditions that did not say what the bank was actually charging, and payroll systems that did not pay what the law required.

7.2 The ANZ warning and the wider week

The same week brought a reminder that the pressure on Australian banks is not only about the past. The chief executive of ANZ, Nuno Matos, publicly called for coordinated global regulation to manage the impact of artificial intelligence on employment, warning that without it the world faces an international jobs crisis. The warning landed in the same week that ANZ’s chief executive had already spoken about AI-driven job displacement, and it came as Australian banks were cutting jobs and moving work offshore. The connection to the CBA and NAB cases is indirect but real. Banks are changing fast, replacing people with systems, and the systems are becoming more complicated. The CBA case is about a digital platform whose terms did not match its charges. The NAB case is about payroll technology that was transferred across systems without being checked. Both are stories about technology outrunning the controls that are supposed to govern it. The week also saw other Australian financial news, including ASIC’s action being described as the first major case under its new chair, and NAB’s undertaking being framed as a test of whether enforceable undertakings can actually change behaviour. The question hanging over all of it is whether the banks have learned the lesson of the Royal Commission, or whether they are simply finding new ways to make the same mistakes.

8. What Happens Next

Neither case is finished. The CBA matter is now before the Federal Court, where it will be argued over months, and the NAB matter will be supervised under an enforceable undertaking that requires the bank to prove its systems have changed. For customers and staff, the practical questions are simpler: will the money arrive, will the systems be fixed, and will it happen again?

8.1 The court timetable and the payroll rebuild

For CBA, the next step is a case management hearing, which the court has not yet listed. The bank will file its defence, ASIC will file its evidence, and the court will decide whether the terms and conditions were misleading and, if so, what penalty is appropriate. The bank has already waived the disputed fees and repaid customers, so the argument is likely to focus on the size of any penalty and on whether the bank’s conduct was as serious as the regulator alleges. For NAB, the next step is the payroll rebuild. The enforceable undertaking requires an independent audit of the bank’s new payroll platform and regular compliance reporting to the board. The bank must also find and repay the remaining affected staff, including former employees who may have moved, changed names, or left the country. The Ombudsman will supervise the process, and the bank’s human resources chief has said it is investing in improving its systems. The test will be whether the audit finds the new platform working properly, and whether the bank can show that the errors have actually stopped.

8.2 The Bottom Line

Two banks, two regulators, two different kinds of failure, one morning. The Commonwealth Bank is accused of charging business customers fees they were never told about, a 27.5-cent charge applied twice, over nineteen years, to 93,000 customers. The National Australia Bank has admitted underpaying 66,000 of its own staff by $127 million over fourteen years, and will pay about $169 million in total plus a record $2 million contrition payment. Both banks reported the problems themselves. Both have repaid the money, or most of it. Both say they have fixed the systems. And both cases raise the same uncomfortable question: how did the biggest, best-resourced institutions in Australian finance get the basics wrong for so long, and what would have happened if they had not found the problems themselves? The courts and the regulators will answer the legal questions in the months ahead. The wider question, whether Australian banking has really changed since the Royal Commission, will take longer to answer, and the answer will be written not in court filings but in whether cases like these keep appearing. The coming days will provide the answers.

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