The federal bureaucracy is poised to crack down on public servants who are paid vastly more, or less, than their work warrants.
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From next week, the Australian Public Service work-level standards – which define the duties and responsibilities of each job level – will become mandatory across government.
The standards are an attempt to restore consistency to the classifications on which public servants' pay is based.
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Many bureaucrats complain that these classifications don't always match the value of work performed, and that very similar jobs in different agencies are classified at different levels.
A compounding problem is the widening pay gaps between government workplaces, which result in some public servants receiving tens of thousands of dollars a year more than other staff employed at nominally the same level.
For example, someone starting an executive level 1 job at Austrade is paid $91,818 a year while a new EL1 at the Treasury receives $104,060.
The Public Service Commission developed the work-level standards in response to a review of the classification system, which found it was neither irretrievably broken nor applied consistently.
Senior public servants told the review that classification management skills had "dissipated over time", jobs were not always classified according to the work done, and that pay levels tended to based on what an agency could afford rather than the demands of the position.
One review report also found that "classification creep" – the gradual shift towards paying more workers at higher levels – was not always justified, and that some staff had been promoted purely to retain them.
"Lower-paying agencies feel some pressure to increase the classification of certain roles so the remuneration they are offering is attractive. Additionally, the competition for staff in the Canberra labour market was mentioned by a number of participants," the report said.
However, much of the "classification creep" was seen to be a legitimate result of the changing nature of work, such as the automation of menial tasks, the outsourcing of lower-level functions, and the growing complexity of many government jobs.
The outgoing Public Service Commissioner, Stephen Sedgwick, said the classification rules would come into effect on December 1, and all agency heads must ensure that any new job complied with the work-level standards.
"Work-level standards are used for more than the formal allocation of classifications to a group of duties in accordance with the classification rules," Mr Sedgwick said in a circular.
"For example, they underpin job and organisational design, and support performance management, capability development and mobility."
The commission has also developed a points-based tool to help agencies decide how to classify a job.
Despite growing concern in recent years about the costs of classification creep, the government's latest workforce data suggests it has come to a halt.
The proportion of public servants employed as middle managers and subject-matter experts (EL1s and EL2s) fell slightly over the year to June 2014. It was the first time the ranks of executive-level officers shrank since the current classifications came into effect in 1999.
