Feb. 15, 2016
Joe Hollmann
[email protected]
CU’s new payroll system went live on Dec. 3 and has caused issues with faculty and student paychecks.
Human Capital Management, the new payroll system, was an upgrade from a 12-year-old process. The issues affected around 20 work-study student employees actively working at UCCS from Dec. 3 to Jan. 30.
Shannon Cable, assistant director of Financial Aid and Student Employment, said the problem was how the new system allocated funds to pay the students.
HCM was allocating 100 percent of the funds from the department the student worked in, instead of the correct ratio, where 74 percent of the funds come from the work-study awards and 26 percent come from the department.
Even though most of the problems were resolved within one to two days, Jeanne Durr, executive director of the Human Resources Office, said it is unacceptable to have these problems in the first place.
“This is an ongoing problem we need to sort out so these problems don’t happen again,” she said.
Durr said she is still confident the features that come with the new HCM system will be beneficial once it stabilizes.
Because of the incorrect distribution, Employee Services must correct the department’s over-allocated budget, then report to the state and federal government, who awards funds for work-study programs.
Cable said they must have all corrections to payrolls fixed by July, or else there could be government audits to the awards.
“The system has the capability to function in the way we want it to, but that’s not to say it hasn’t been a season of challenge,” Cable said.
Cable is part of a team that manually reviews every student employee’s payroll who worked during this time, ensuring every dollar was accounted for.
“The work-study funds are important to campus and ultimately important to students,” Cable said.
Cable said they are reviewing payrolls for the entire student employee population, not just the 20 students affected.
The 2015-16 average number of student employees on campus is around 1400.
Cable also said the departments are taking these new system problems seriously.
“The main thing is that we want to reassure our students that we have the utmost confidence in the new HCM system in spite of the early challenges we faced.”
Durr explained the new system makes it easier to upgrade from one version of the system to the next, while the old system prevented any sort of upgrades and was outdated.
IT works directly with Cable to help ensure that there is administrative ability to allocate the work-study funding to the right accounts, according to Cable.