PSS: They’ll get their money back

The Public School System promised yesterday that the money that was inadvertently deducted from their employees’ payroll accounts would be paid back.

PSS director of finance Richard Waldo apologized for all the trouble, which was traced to a computer glitch, and said he only learned of the faulty deductions yesterday morning after arriving at his office.

Waldo said that, for some unknown reason, the computer program truncated the date ranges in the “Chapter 7” accounting of payroll.

“It screwed up and changed the dates in the program,” he said.

Waldo said his office would request acting Finance Secretary Eloy Inos to give them back the money so they could return the sum to the bank accounts of affected employees.

However, Waldo requested PSS employees to be patient in getting back the deductions and to give PSS enough time to recover the money.

“We will get their money back to them,” he assured, while explaining that, since his office relies on only one payroll employee, the process would take a while.

Nonetheless, he assured PSS employees that they would “definitely be reimbursed.”

A PSS information technology consultant has been looking at the cause of the problem since yesterday.

Waldo said the consultant discovered the changes in the encoded information of the employees. He said PSS now has to manually fill out the appropriate fields with the correct information.

He said a similar payroll problem occurred in 2001 when the machine automatically changed the current year to 3001, which affected the entire PSS operations before being remedied.

Waldo also explained that some employees complaining of high deductions this recent pay period might actually have some loans due for deductions anyway “and the computer glitch only spiked it a little bit.”

The problem might have been aggravated by the recent power outage on Capitol Hill two days ago, according to PSS associate commissioner for administrative services David M. Borja. Waldo did not dismiss this possibility.

Borja said even his payroll was affected when he checked his account yesterday. He thought the higher deductions he received were unusual.

He said he was told that the discrepancy affected the depositing of the money to banks and to the Revenue and Tax Division but not the checks.

The associate commissioner also said the computer glitch also affected the release of the checks for vendors, which is why the office has posted a notice that vendors checks would be released upon notice.

“We do apologize for the incident. The money, though, is not lost,” said Borja.

The incident reportedly wreaked havoc Wednesday, with employees complaining that their paychecks were deducted almost $200 each when they checked their accounts that day.

A teacher from Hopwood Junior High School said she was surprised when she found out that her paycheck was almost $200 less than what she had expected to get for the payroll period.

She then found out that she wasn’t alone when she overheard her colleagues complaining about the mysterious deductions on their latest paychecks.