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Govt suspends direct deposit of payroll
The Department of Finance advised CNMI government employees yesterday that it is temporarily suspending the direct deposit of wages and salaries, as a communications outage continues to affect the Commonwealth.
In her advisory, Finance Secretary Larissa Larson said “the disruption of technology in the CNMI has had a significant impact on the processing of direct deposits of all of our CNMI government employees.”
“Until the technology issues are resolved by IT&E, all direct deposits of payroll checks will be suspended. The Department of Finance will be issuing paper checks to all CNMI government employees until further notice,” she wrote.
The Finance chief also urged the early submission of payroll documents.
“Effective immediately, and to ensure that payroll is processed in a timely manner, all time summary reports, as well as any and all other required payroll documents must be submitted to the DOF Division of Finance & Accounting Payroll section no later than the close of business on the Wednesday following the release of the payroll,” the advisory said.
She apologized “for any inconvenience that this may cause you as a result of this situation that is beyond our control, but are committed to timely payroll. We know we can make this happen if all departments and agencies comply with this order.”
Larson described the impact of the outage to her department as “very significant,” adding that the outage caused delays on drawdowns on federal funds and severely affected the department’s reporting activities, among other things.
She said the outage compelled the department to manually process some 1,500 checks for government employees who then had to rush to the bank to have their checks changed into cash.
Government employees would normally have gotten a direct deposit in their bank accounts.
