Those are some of the impacts Syracuse City School District employees have felt from a botched rollout of a new payroll platform that has left hundreds underpaid and some temporarily missing entire paychecks, the head of the district’s largest employee union told syracuse.com.
On July 31, the district activated the payroll function of a new Oracle financial and human resources software that has cost $10.9 million to date. Since then, the Syracuse Teachers Association has been fielding complaints about missing checks, payments that failed to include raises or stipends, incorrect deductions for benefits like health insurance and other issues.
In the first week of school, at least 900 teachers and staff told the STA their paycheck was screwed up. That’s almost one in three union members.
The union president says they’ve been working with district leadership, including the board of education, to get issues fixed, but she remains frustrated at a lack of progress in getting the new system working as promised. The union believes the district needs to be putting more pressure on outside consultants paid to help the district through the transition.
“That level of support is not there,” said Nicole Capsello, president of the Syracuse Teachers Association. “This is not urgent for them at all.”
Instead, the district and the union have been chipping away at problems as they arise, but holding their breath every time a new payroll cycle ends, Capsello said.
District officials acknowledged the issues in written answers to syracuse.com questions but said they’re working with employees, union leadership and the technology experts to get the situation fixed. That could include bringing another consultant, the school board president said, but they’re not yet disclosing who that would be and how much it would cost.
The acknowledgement that there are problems is not providing much comfort to affected employees. For many workers in lower-wage positions, being shorted even less than $100 can be a big burden, Capsello said. Studies have shown well over half of the nation lives paycheck to paycheck, and that’s reflected in the STA membership, she said.
“These are real-life situations that our members are facing,” she said.
The STA represents a wide spectrum of the district’s staff, including teachers, aides and monitors, nurses, food-service workers and specialists such as speech language pathologists and counselors. The payroll issues have affected staff across all of the STA bargaining units.
“We all know that once you get behind in something, it’s so difficult, between the fees and the collections that make it that much harder to catch up,” Capsello said.
The STA has filed a grievance with district to preserve its rights in fighting to make members whole, a step that could lead to an independent arbitration case.
So far, though, the union has worked cooperatively with the district to tackle the problem, Capsello said. At this point the union doesn’t intend to file a lawsuit, a step colleagues in Rochester took last week on behalf of members facing similar problems with an Oracle payroll conversion.
A big test will come Wednesday, when the next round of paychecks is issued. Just as it has since the new system took effect, STA will post a link on its website to a form members can fill out to report problems.
While there were bugs in the system from the start, the August payroll issues were manageable because most district employees don’t get paid in the summer. But when the Sept. 15 payroll arrived, STA collected reports of roughly 900 incorrect checks. For the Sept. 30 checks, there have been about 275, a sign of progress but still not acceptable to the STA, Capsello said.
“We’ve got to be making sure everyone is paid on Oct. 15,” she said.
The district does not have data on precisely how many employees have experienced problems, or the total dollar amount of money that was shorted.
“We are not auditing this information but rather focusing on making sure that the employee compensation is correct,” spokesperson Amanda Malinowski said.
She said the district’s Oracle conversion started about three years ago when the technology giant was expected to phase out support for its PeopleSoft program that the district had been using. The project has involved integrating the Oracle platform into the district’s financial systems, human resources systems and payroll. The payroll piece was the last to go online.
To date, the district has spent the bulk of its funds on two firms tasked with guiding the conversion: $8.8 million on Highstreet, the Oracle transition partner, and $2.1 million on Berry Dunn, a transition consultant. The school board has approved contracts with both totaling a combined $12.5 million.
The STA is frustrated with the service from the outside vendors and is urging the district to bring in new experts who would be onsite and dedicated fully to fixing Syracuse issues.
District leadership does not agree with the strategy to have outside experts on site, Malinowski said.
“There is nothing that an Oracle expert can do on site that cannot be accomplished remotely,” she said. “It is more efficient for them to focus on the solutions rather than traveling and lodging in Syracuse which would take time away from the work and would add additional cost to the project.”
Malinowski said the payroll problems have resulted from both the complexity of changing over to a new comprehensive system and the implementation of new procedures for staff in submitting time worked.
“There is a learning curve for our employees,” Malinowski said. “We have and will continue to provide training and support to our staff members which will greatly reduce the number of issues and problems once staff are fully trained and experienced in using this new system and process.”
The school board has issued a formal apology to all staff and directed Superintendent Anthony Davis to report on additional resources needed to fix issues, board President Tamica Barnett said in an email to syracuse.com.
She also said the board plans to have an outside agency conduct an audit of the Oracle transition and “determine if the district should go forward with the implementation or if the district should go in another direction.”
Barnett did not respond to follow-up questions asking for the name of that agency and how much it would be paid.
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