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PSS teachers get their money back
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Posted on Jan 23 2006
More than 600 Public School System employees heaved a sigh of relief yesterday when they got their refund of the amount that was inadvertently deducted from their paychecks last week due to a computer glitch.
PSS director of finance Richard Waldo confirmed with the Saipan Tribune yesterday afternoon that 99 percent of more than 600 employees of the CNMI education office have already received their reimbursements yesterday.
Waldo had said last week that the reimbursement would take some time and that his office would still have to request acting Finance Secretary Eloy Inos for the refund.
It turned out that they didn’t need to go through Finance at all, Waldo said, because he found out that the deducted money had not been remitted yet to Inos’ office.
He said the PSS just recomputed the employees’ payroll in “Chapter 7” and immediately released the refunds yesterday.
“The distribution of the refund will be completed today,” he said.
Kagman High School teacher Roger L. Church confirmed yesterday that he received his refund of more than $140 from the PSS. He also confirmed seeing a long list of employees at their school who were due the same refund. He said he was pleasantly surprised at the immediate reimbursement by PSS. “I understand the mistakes,” he said.
Waldo earlier apologized for all the trouble and said that, for some unknown reason, the computer program truncated the date ranges in the “Chapter 7” accounting of payroll.
A PSS information technology consultant looked at the cause of the problem Friday morning and discovered the changes in the encoded information of the employees.
The PSS finance director 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 last pay period might actually have some loans due for deductions anyway “and the computer glitch only spiked it a little bit.”
