National President, New Zealand Principals’ Federation
Novopain Nightmare The last six months of school life have been dominated by the new teacher payroll, Novopay. There is not a tax payer in the country who isn’t wondering how something can go so badly wrong, and indeed whether it can ever be fixed. As one reporter said to me recently, the remarkable story would be that Novopay was working. Initially it was mildly amusing that the Ministry should be managing such a mess, but as the horror stories have continued it is clear that real people are being completely stressed and distracted by the continual errors, overpayments, underpayments, and no payments at all. Payroll staff and principals have simply had enough. During the development phase of the software, Australian company Talent2 was very confident about their platform and its suitability to the task. Parallel runs using the new software were completed that produced pays which seemingly matched Datacom’s calculations, so there was no hesitation when the Minister asked the Ministry whether they should “go-live”. But things are not always what they seem as we now know. Novopay was launched in August 2012. This was despite a survey which was never shared by the Ministry that indicated that schools didn’t feel ready, and were not happy with the training. Another big gap that was not considered with Novopay was the reliance that pay staff and principals had traditionally placed on their local pay clerks. These bright young people stood between the needs of the school and the intricacies of the Collective Agreements. They knew all the mystical obscurities of paying maternity leave, or managing a leave day taken either side of a school holiday. If they didn’t, there were older and wiser heads they could ask. They turned what was in a school’s mind into a single line on a payslip. In the middle of a wakeful night last November I was listening to the news on the radio. The announcer told us that the Oxford English Dictionary had decided that its Word of the Year was “omnishambles”, meaning a situation which is shambolic from every possible angle. I instantly thought of Novopay and now whenever it is mentioned my brain reminds me of this highly appropriate adjective. The problems are significant, and will require the co-operation of the entire education sector. There is absolutely no confidence in its usability, its accuracy, its service centre, its reports, its payslips, or indeed any part of it. Good software is intuitive, yet this interface is not. It would almost be more comforting if every school suffered the same issues, as this would point to an error in an algorithm that
could be easily fixed, but the problems are not general – they are random and school specific. It appears that many are due to data entry errors by Novopay staff – for example mistakes such as entering the wrong school number are what lead to people being paid by schools they have never worked for. The reports are impossible to read. I have heard of one staff member generating over forty lines of “pay code” in a SUE Report. The failure of the reports to accurately report banked staffing lead me to think that the Ministry doesn’t understand the importance of these resources. Swings of tens of thousands of dollars are being reported in banked staffing summaries, but because the need to pay people accurately is of higher priority, any fix has been on the back burner since it was noticed. I don’t believe that any principal in New Zealand will be prepared to sign off on their year’s payroll when the auditor HOW TO SAVE TIME ON CALENDAR FUNDRAISING KEY TIMESAVERS: • COLLATING CALENDAR ORDERS: once your order is complete, Kids Creations will deliver the calendars, diaries, etc., packaged (each child’s order packed) and ready to distribute, collated in class groups • COLLATING RESOURCES: calendar resources are collated into class packs, ready to distribute in class • PERSONALISED ORDER FORMS: we print personalised calendar order forms for you, with your school’s information • GETTING IT RIGHT FIRST TIME: quality control systems to ensure that our calendars, cards, diaries, notebooks and mousemats will impress What other fundraisers are saying about Kids Creations:
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comes calling shortly, and I don’t know how successive fortnights of errors can ever be reconciled back to pre-Novopay positions. The NZ Principals’ Federation wrote to both the Auditor General and the Prime Minister on 21 December, and formally requested an independent review of the processes and quality of the Novopay solution. We are pleased that the newly appointed Novopay Minister, Hon Steven Joyce, has since announced both a technical and Ministerial review of Novopay. The technical review is almost completed as this issue goes to press and we expect that the Ministerial review will take a further three months. I was invited to comment on the terms of reference for the Ministerial review and overall feel that Minister Joyce is making a concerted effort to uncover the truth about Novopay’s reality. We welcome this fresh approach, even if part of the Government’s motivation is to take the political heat off itself. I have also made a formal written request to the Minister to compensate schools for the real costs that implementing Novopay has imposed and have asked for an extension of Charter deadline submission to April 2nd. We know that staff who assist in preparing data for the Charter are often the same staff who are dealing with the continual Novopay errors and these staff are stretched beyond their limits already. Because we do not expect the Ministerial inquiry to conclude inside of the next three months, we will have at least another three months of troubled pay rounds to look forward to. I will be seeking additional support for schools to help us get through the months ahead. Perhaps it is time to transition the Novopay Call Centre teams back into those special people, the local payroll experts. That might give back to schools the time and energy to put into their core tasks, teaching and learning.
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