When payday rolls around at the Vermont State Colleges, employees are reporting that they’re never sure how much money they’re going to get.
One student reported getting an $8,000 check for two weeks of part-time work-study, according to the Castleton Spartan. Some staff members said they’d worked six weeks and had yet to receive a check.
That’s all because of a switch in the Vermont State Colleges’ payroll system. The new system, UtlPro, standardizes what used to be independent systems for each of the VSC’s four colleges — but people using the system say it’s rife with errors.
Chancellor Jeb Spaulding said last payday, 2,600 people got checks, and 55 of them needed corrections — a 2% correction rate.
“Any time a single person isn’t getting paid what they should when they should, that’s a problem,” he said. “But it’s important to think about scale here.”
Spaulding said the issues don’t share one root cause. He said people have been incorrectly entering hours and making other input errors. He said there has been a lot of confusion over how to use the new system, and that has been causing mistakes.
“It is very serious when there is a problem with someone’s pay,” said Sandy Noyes, VSC Staff Federation unit chair. “We are trying to get through the payroll system problems in addition to convincing the state that colleges need better funding so we can keep present and future generations in Vermont.”
Noyes said there have also been issues with the payroll system affecting deductions for employees’ health care, retirement and taxes. There have been errors in calculations for sick pay, and some instances of health care deductions being doubled.
The problem has overwhelmingly affected staff and student workers, rather than faculty, Spaulding said, because of the way staff enter hours for pay. Faculty are salaried workers.
But he said VSC is not dealing with a big backlog. As long as people report problems immediately, they should be solved promptly. He said if someone hadn’t been paid for six weeks, it’s likely they hadn’t reported the problems immediately.
“We’ll write a paper check, we’ll do whatever we need to do,” he said, to make sure workers are correctly paid.
Spaudling said VSC will work with the people who were incorrectly overpaid to try to settle up over a period of time.
Spaulding said he firmly believes that the VSC picked the right vendor for the new system, and that in time it will be more customer friendly than the system before it.
“People in the past used to go down the hallway to get something taken care of,” he said. “But we’ve been one corporation since 1961, we get into problems if people are doing all these different things in the same company.”
