So far, the state has issued 443 supplemental paychecks to workers who didn't get 10% or more of the salary they earned, said Stacey Rolston, who is heading the human resources chunk of the state's huge IT project known as STAR.
Perhaps several hundred more either didn't get their required overtime hours, extra pay for night or weekend hours or certain expense payments. Others got overtime for which they don't qualify, Rolston said.
In those cases, the state is working to add or subtract the incorrect amounts from the workers' next paychecks to bring them to the right totals.
Meanwhile, the state also is trying to work out a variety of problems that have made it appear that at least 150 state employees didn't have health insurance when they actually did. No state worker has had their coverage dropped, Rolston stressed in an interview Thursday.
With the project being a decade in the making and affecting 34,000 workers and their paychecks, the problems could have been much worse, said John Hogan, assistant deputy secretary for administration.
"What we see every week is, 'Wow, everybody got paid.' Because a lot of companies and governments don't get that right the first time" in a big IT switch-over, Hogan said. "These are not catastrophic failures by any means....These are not problems that are going to be problems for months."
Gov. Scott Walker's administration had said on Jan. 8 that a variety of payroll problems highlighted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel would be fixed by Thursday, which marked the second round of paychecks going out to tens of thousands of workers.
The problems have diminished but many remain, Hogan said Thursday.
The reasons for the payroll and benefits glitches are as varied as the state's payroll process itself. Some of the issues are due to problems with the overall system while others are due to user errors by state workers, supervisors and private health care providers, Rolston said.
Because of changes in some employees' ID numbers, some health care providers have had trouble finding the workers in their systems and have concluded that the employees weren't covered, administration officials said. In fact, workers haven't lost their coverage and their providers may be able to find them by searching for the employee's name rather than an ID number, Rolston said.
For the past two weeks, the Journal Sentinel has been asking about the continuing problems with employees' pay and other benefits. On Thursday, administration officials provided more information about the STAR system's challenges in response.
The payroll issue has arisen as part of a broader initiative known as STAR that seeks to replace scores of state computer systems, including some that are decades old. Most state officials agree that the ambitious update is desperately needed and could yield eventual savings for taxpayers if handled correctly
Administration officials said the state's outside consultants on the project say that Wisconsin has fared better than many other states that have undertaken similar projects.
"In 16 years of experience with 11 (similar) implementations, this was by far the most successful go-live. I strongly believe it was due to strong leadership at all levels," Rob Nolan of Gartner Consulting said in a statement released by the Walker administration.
©2016 the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
