Payroll deduction records

Name: Payroll deduction records
Creator: TestPattern Community
License: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

Detects payroll deduction records for an identified employee: deduction authorisations, salary sacrifice agreements, union fee, child support, health fund, workplace giving and novated lease deductions, with the deduction amount.

Type: regex
Engine: boost_regex
Confidence: medium
Confidence justification: Medium: the primary phrases also appear in policies, guidance, blank forms and news, so enforce tiers require a populated field with a non-placeholder value and 85 adds a record-specific populated detail plus independent corroboration. Person and record values are customer-defined, so the field regexes use labelled loose values with a placeholder guard. 85/75 are heuristic evidence tiers, not measured accuracy.
Detection quality: Topic false positive
Jurisdictions: au, global
Regulations: Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), Fair Work Regulations 2009 (Cth), Industrial Relations Act 2016 (Qld), Taxation Administration Act 1953 (Cth), Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), Information Privacy Act 2009 (Qld)
Frameworks: ISO 27001, ISO 27701
Data categories: financial, employment, pii
Scope: wide
Risk rating: 4
Platform compatibility: Purview: Compatible, GCP DLP: Compatible, Macie: Compatible, Zscaler: Compatible, Palo Alto: Degraded, Netskope: Unsupported

Pattern

(?i)\b(?:payroll\s+deductions?\s+(?:records?|authori[sz]ations?|forms?|schedules?|registers?|reports?)|deduction\s+authori[sz]ations?|authority\s+to\s+deduct|salary\s+sacrifice\s+(?:agreements?|arrangements?|elections?)|voluntary\s+(?:payroll\s+)?deductions?|child\s+support\s+deductions?|union\s+(?:fees|dues)\s+deductions?|payroll\s+giving|workplace\s+giving\s+deductions?|(?:pre|post)[\s-]tax\s+deductions?)\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

signed, written authority, authorised, approved, commencing, per pay, per fortnight, payroll, cease

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

Payroll deduction authorisation Employee name: Avery Teston Employee ID: 4471820 Deduction type: Union fees Amount per pay: $18.50 Commencing pay period ending 10/10/2026 Signed by the employee; written authority held on file. — 85: deduction authorisation with employee, amount per pay and signed written authority
Salary sacrifice agreement Staff member: Morgan Teston Novated lease: $412.30 per fortnight Health fund: $96.20 Approved by payroll on 02/09/2026. — 85: salary sacrifice agreement with novated lease and health fund amounts
Child support deduction Employee: Jordan Staffson Please action the attached notice from the next pay run. — 75: child support deduction naming the employee, no amount
salary sacrifice agreement — 65: bare phrase only - discovery tier

Should not match

An employer can only deduct money from an employee's pay if the employee agrees in writing and it is principally for their benefit. This fact sheet also covers salary sacrifice arrangements. — FWO-style guidance - must stay at or below 65
Payroll deduction authorisation form Employee name: __________ Deduction type: __________ Amount per pay: $______ — Blank deduction form - must stay at or below 65
Workplace giving deductions rose sharply last year, according to a news release from the charity sector. — News - must stay at or below 65
unrelated generic text without domain phrases — No relevant topic phrases present

Known false positives

Policies, procedures, regulator guidance, fact sheets and training material that name the record type. Mitigation: Enforce tiers require populated fields; guidance has labels without values, and policy/guidance/training/media-release framing is excluded by the NOT-group.
Blank forms, templates and system configuration screens. Mitigation: Blank lines, bracket placeholders, XXX and n/a/tbc values are rejected by the placeholder guard; template/fixture words are excluded by template-exclusion.
News, statistics and vendor marketing. Mitigation: No populated person or record fields, so these stay at 65 discovery.
Deduction records that identify the employee only in free text fall to 65. Mitigation: Accepted precision trade-off; extend the person-field regex with the customer employee-ID format.