Payroll Switch Leaves Students Without Checks

Harvard’s switch to a new payroll system late last month has left many students employed by the University without their paychecks.

According to several student employees and Director of the Student Employment Office Martha H. Homer, an undetermined number of student employees have not received pay this fall.

But Marilyn D. Touborg, director of communications for Harvard’s office of human resources, said the department was unaware of any major payroll problems.

“PeopleSoft—our new payroll system—seems to be working quite well,” Touborg said. “This [problem]is certainly upsetting to the people it is affecting, but if you look also at the enormity of this project, by and large it has gone very well.”

But Russell P. Leino ’05, who works at the bells’ desk in Currier House and in Hilles Library, said the University has not paid him for the nearly 50 hours he has worked since the beginning of the school year.

“Right now I’m scraping the bottom,” Leino said. “I haven’t bought any of my books yet. It’s a bad situation for me.”

Leino said his boss told him yesterday that he would probably be paid by Oct. 25.

Leino said he has heard that a “backup entering people into the new payroll system” caused the paycheck delay and that less than 10 of his 30 student co-workers at Currier have received paychecks this school year.

J. Alan Dodd ’05, a research assistant for the economics department, said the new system has left him unpaid for 32 hours of work since the beginning of the fall.

Dodd said his boss told him the software upgrade caused the delay and that he should receive his paycheck—usually distributed weekly—on Oct. 28.

Harvard’s Human Resources Project, designed to develop improved computer systems for human resources, payroll, benefits and time collection, switched to PeopleSoft in late September in order to upgrade the system.

“In our case we had to have a new system primarily because the old one was about to fall apart. It wasn’t even one system, and we had to make the different systems work together, but they didn’t,” Touborg said.

According to Touborg, any problems in the new system are caused by people “having difficulty getting up to speed” with the operations of PeopleSoft.

For example, Touborg said, it’s possible that payroll information of new employees was not entered soon enough into the new system or that employees and employers have not yet adapted to the new electronic time sheet system.

Gregory J. Wrenn ’02-’03, who works in the Writing Center, said he has found it impossible to use the new system—and, as a result, he said he has not been paid for his work this year.

“I went to input my hours online, but I don’t know if they actually went through,” Wrenn said. “I think it’s good that they’re reducing paperwork but the system is not very user-friendly. It should be self-explanatory.”

Wrenn said he had no trouble filling out time sheets by hand for the past two years, turning them into the payroll office, and receiving a paycheck on time.

Touborg said that based on calls to a University hotline for paycheck problems, there remain only 20 employees with unresolved paycheck problems. She said only 10 of these deal with unreceived checks.

Carlos R. Gonzalez ’05 said he was paid for his work at Widener during the month of September, but he has yet to receive a paycheck for the week after the switch to PeopleSoft.

“I’m supposed to get paid on Oct. 27 now, and I hope it works out,” he said.

Dodd and Gonzalez said they had not heard about the hotline Touborg mentioned, but that they had informed their bosses of the paycheck problems.

Wrenn said he had not yet reported his paycheck problem.

Homer said she felt “optimistic” students experiencing payroll problems would receive all of the money owed to them in paychecks this Friday.

Although Touborg said the system is operating well, she said that a University with 15,000 regular employees and thousands of temporary employees is bound to experience problems using the new system.

Touborg said students with paycheck problems should call (617) 495-3001.

—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt can be reached at steinhar@fas.harvard.edu.