Uniqlo Australia says an internal audit has uncovered underpayments of staff stretching back seven years with the fashion retailer now contacting impacted workers to organise redress.

An email from the brand to a former employee, shared with Inside Retail, shows Uniqlo identified “a number of errors” in the calculation of wages and superannuation payments between July 1, 2015 and June 30 last year.

“Earlier this year, we shared with our store teams that we were undertaking a remediation program in relation to our compliance with the General Retail Industry Award for our Australian retail operations,” Uniqlo said in an email to an affected employee.

“This followed an initial review of our employment compliance standards, which informed us that there was an oversight in our rostering process and within our payroll system, resulting in a number of store staff members being underpaid,” the retailer said.

Uniqlo said the underpayments resulted from a “genuine oversight” on its part and that the company is actively working to assess and rectify the situation with the aid of the Fair Work Ombudsman.

The Japan-headquartered company is also revising and re-investing in its HR and payroll processes with the help of external auditors.

Uniqlo Australia confirmed the circumstances in an email to Inside Retail, but did not disclose how many employees were affected or the sum of underpayments involved.

“Our team is very important to us and we are sorry to all valued current and former employees impacted by these errors. We are working to rectify and remediate these issues, with back payment and interest, as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson said.

“Since becoming aware of the issues, we have made enhancements to our systems and processes to prevent this from happening again.”