German car giant Volkswagen, scrambling to contain a massive pollution test cheating scandal, said Sunday it would begin rotating staff to keep better tabs on its operations.

Employees in key roles will switch jobs more often than is currently the case, VW supervisory board chief Hans Dieter Poetsch said in an interview with the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

"The relevant employees will only stay a certain amount of time in a specific job and then change," he was quoted as saying.

He said the new personnel plan was intended to break up long-standing structures that allowed rules to be broken in secret.

Poetsch said the scheme would be introduced along with new oversight mechanisms.

"We will bolster checks, determine responsibilities in a clearer way and better implement technical supervision of procedures," he said.

Poetsch added that the "four-eyes principle" of at least two people being involved in key work would become a company watchword.

He admitted that some positions were so specialised that frequent rotation could pose challenges.

But he said that such jobs could be filled within the Volkswagen group, with people switching, for example, from Audi to Porsche to the VW brand manufacturing divisions.

Volkswagen was plunged into its deepest-ever scandal in September, when it was forced to admit it had installed emissions cheating software into 11 million diesel engine vehicles worldwide.

VW was found to have used so-called "defeat devices" that activate emissions controls during testing, then turn them off under normal operations, allowing illegal amounts of nitrogen oxide to spew into the air.

The costs facing VW, once seen as the paragon of German industry, are still incalculable, in terms of reputation and global earnings and because it faces billions in possible fines and legal costs.

Chief executive Martin Winterkorn resigned in the wake of the allegations but insisted he knew nothing about the scam.

VW's ex-chief Winterkorn still drawing huge salary: report
Frankfurt (AFP) Dec 18, 2015 - Volkswagen's former chief executive Martin Winterkorn, who quit in the wake of the massive pollution-cheating scandal, is still on the carmaker's books and receiving a huge salary, according to two German media reports on Friday.

The business daily Handelsblatt and German public television's investigative news programme Frontal 21 said Winterkorn's contract runs until the end of 2016, as agreed, and he is receiving his full salary.

The two reports quoted sources close to VW's supervisory board.

Winterkorn, 68, was in the driving seat at the auto giant from 2007 until the scandal broke in September.

Under the terms of his salary, he has a basic annual salary of 1.62 million euros ($1.8 billion), plus a range of generous bonuses.

Winterkorn was paid more than 15 million euros in total in 2014, making him the highest-paid executive among the 30 companies that make up the German blue-chip DAX 30 stock index.

Quoting the sources close to the supervisory board, VW saw "no reason not to continue paying" him, Handelsblatt reported.

That meant Winterkorn would receive more than 10 million euros for 2015, it said.

Originally, VW had wanted to draw a line under the Winterkorn era, but had not wanted to pay the manager a huge golden payout out of fear of possible public criticism, the newspaper continued.

But Winterkorn, for his part, had refused to forego the money since he regarded himself as innocent, it said.

VW, vying with Toyota to become the world's biggest carmaker in terms of sales, is currently engulfed in a scandal of global proportions after it admitted to installing pollution-cheating software into 11 million diesel engines worldwide.

Winterkorn resigned in the wake of the allegations, but insisted he knew nothing about the scam.