Payroll Systems

OK, it's understandable. Transportation planners need the surety of a good clock. After all, hundreds of employees need to be accurately clocked-in if the buses in Orange County are to run on time. But $457,280 for a new timepiece system to keep tabs on bus mechanics? It's a question that surfaced Thursday at an Orange County Transportation Authority committee meeting. "I'm trying to get my arms around why we're paying $125,000 just for the software. . . .

A Florida company won the rights to Axium International Inc.'s staffing subsidiary at a federal bankruptcy auction Wednesday, two weeks after the Hollywood payroll service provider abruptly folded. MPS Group Inc., a provider of staffing and consulting services, won the auction after its bid of $8.075 million was approved by a bankruptcy judge during a three-hour proceeding in downtown Los Angeles. The publicly traded Jacksonville, Fla.

A legislator whose wife was one of thousands of teachers issued erroneous paychecks by the Los Angeles Unified School District last year seeks to punish its leaders and force the district to pay the taxes on its overpayments. Ethics watchdogs say that is a conflict of interest for the lawmaker, Assemblyman Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia). Mendoza said that when the system went haywire last year, it overpaid his wife by an amount still under dispute, then didn't pay her at all for two months.

A costly, 20-month saga of futility and frustration came to a formal close Wednesday when the Los Angeles Unified School District announced that it had settled a dispute with the contractor that installed its payroll system, which overpaid and underpaid tens of thousands of teachers and other employees by tens of millions of dollars. The district said the company it had hired, Deloitte Consulting, agreed to pay $8.

A slowly improving but still-sputtering payroll system has prompted Los Angeles school district officials to set up regional help centers to spare employees the new and unwelcome ritual of tromping downtown to get paid. Two staffers will be housed in each of eight regional offices of the Los Angeles Unified School District to resolve payroll problems no later than mid-May, officials said Wednesday. That's about five months too late as far as thousands of employees are concerned.

Widespread problems plaguing a new computer payroll system in the Los Angeles school district and a decision to delay the final phase of a massive technology overhaul have boosted its price tag by more than $46 million, officials said. The Los Angeles Unified School District has some money available to offset the additional costs, but there remains a deficit of at least $37.5 million, district officials told a school board panel Thursday.

Since launching a $95-million computer system six months ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District has been beset by programming glitches, hardware crashes and mistakes by hurriedly trained clerical staff. The result: tens of thousands of teachers, cafeteria workers, classroom aides and others have been underpaid, overpaid or not paid at all. The hardest hit have been the roughly 48,000 certificated employees -- teachers and others who require a credential to perform their jobs.

For eight months a defective payroll system has wreaked havoc on the Los Angeles Unified School District, leaving tens of thousands of employees unpaid, paid too little or overpaid. With a solution still months away and the fallout worsening, the district's Board of Education took an unusual step last week, deciding to hire an independent monitor, who will report to the board on district efforts to rectify the debacle.

Nearly a year after being hired to run the Los Angeles public school system, Supt. David L. Brewer filled some key cabinet-level posts this week and added to the stable of outside consultants trying to fix a faulty payroll system that has underpaid and overpaid thousands of employees. To find the district's chief financial officer, Brewer, a retired Navy admiral, tapped the financial manager of the Navy's postgraduate college.