State employees warned of possible irregularities in switch to new payroll system

by Alicia Freese May 23, 2013 www.vtdigger.org State employees received a memo Wednesday telling them to brace for possible ‘pay discrepancies’in the near future. That’s because the state is in the midst of transition from an antiquated payroll system to a new one. State employees will make the switch on May 28.
Commissioner of Human Resources Kate Duffy said the only problems they anticipate are the typical glitches that come with transitioning from one database to another.
‘We don’t really see this as a problem. We know that we are going to have some bumps in the road. The memo was to give people a heads up that if there are pay discrepancies, there are ways to triage that,’Duffy said.
The memo states, ‘It is anticipated that some state employees, particularly those with the most complex compensation rules, may see a difference in their pay in the new system. This could be for a variety of reasons, including data entry errors, the processing of bargaining agreement pay rules more accurately or errors related to the design of the system.’
Duffy said they expect to encounter a number of ‘data entry issues,’where people code things incorrectly because they are unfamiliar with the new system.
In the old system, employees manually recorded their hours. As a result, they may have made mistakes when deciding how to code their hours, Duffy said. For instance, an employee may have been recording some of their hours as on-call shifts, which are billed at a higher rate, when, in reality, this wasn’t written into their collective bargaining agreement.
Collective bargaining agreements can be ‘incredibly complex,’Duffy said. The system is especially complex for employees in the Public Safety and Corrections departments, according to Duffy.
In the new system, the rules for coding are built into this system, which means employees are less likely to get pay they aren’t entitled to.
Duffy said a change in how numbers are rounded in the new system could also affect people’s pay.
The memo, which came from Jeb Spaulding, the secretary of administration, assures state employees that pay errors will be addressed as soon as possible. They’ll prioritize the problems based on how large the discrepancy is.
VSEA, the state employees union, declined to comment on any potential rollout problems.