Corporate groups

A corporate group, also known as Corporate Structure – is a group of legal entities (subsidiaries) controlled by a parent entity. The Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 identifies a relevant employer as either a standalone, a subsidiary, or an entire corporate group.

When assessing a corporate groups eligibility the total employee count of the group (of onshore Australia based employees) is used.

• If your group employs 100 or more employees in total for 6 or more months of a 12-month reporting period – you must register all employing entities with WGEA regardless of their individual entity size
• Your group will not be required to report when the total employee count across all employing entities falls below 80 for 6 or more months of a reporting period.

Within corporate groups, employing ABNs that themselves employ 100 or more employees are 'relevant employers' in their own right.

• Gender pay gap information is published for relevant employers.

Corporate groups may have multiple employing entities to report data each year, they can be reported in one or more submissions.

• Corporate group employers can organise their legal entities into one or more submissions to reduce the burden of reporting data each year.
• When a group is registered for the first time, all recorded entities of a corporate group are placed into the same submission at the outset.

Contact WGEA via email or support request to update your submission groups.

• Organisations can form a submission group if they are part of the same corporate structure, enrolled in the same program, and have similar workplace policies and strategies as there is one set of questionnaire responses for each submission.

 Compliance certificates are issued only when all submission groups within a corporate group have completed the report without recording any issues. 

• It is the ultimate responsibility of the parent company to ensure all expected submissions are compliant, if a subsidiary submission is non-compliant this will result in non-compliance for the parent company.

You must ensure that all subsidiaries that employ staff are included in your submission(s) to WGEA

• You do not need to complete separate reports for each ABN, you can combine one or more legal entities into a single ‘submission group’.

Questionnaire

• Responses must cover all ABNs in the submission accurately
• Each questionnaire section contains a free text response that can be used to provide additional context as to how it was answered.

Workforce Management Statistics

• You must complete one file per employing ABN in your submission group.
• The section will not be complete until each employing ABN has a file uploaded.

Workplace Profile

• Employees for each employing ABN confirmed for the submission must appear in your uploaded file(s).
• The section will not be complete until each ABN in your submission group has reported employees in an uploaded file.