About 100,000 employment tribunal cases a year are attributable to payroll disputes, a study has shown.

Employment Law Advisory Services (ELAS) found that complicated payrolls, a "blizzard" of wage regulations, and unauthorised deductions from pay were behind many of the distributes.

The survey of 2,000 businesses in the retail sector also revealed that 1,000 tribunals result from employees not being given regular payslips from their bosses.

Some 98,806 tribunals in the 12 months up to March 31st 2008 were pay-related disputes. This was double the number of unfair dismissal cases and four times the number of sex discrimination cases.

ELAS spokeswoman Annabel Dawkins said: "Businesses sometimes get overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of handling workers' pay.

"Our research showed that small and medium-sized firms in particular can get fazed by the laws and regulations impacting on pay, and how they apply to their workforce."

Smaller businesses said they needed specialist legal help to cope given the "potentially disastrous consequences of getting an employee's pay even slightly wrong", Ms Dawkins added.