Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District brought in consultants Monday for payroll mishaps that continue to plague the district.
The latest affected 900 auxiliary staff members who were supposed to be paid Wednesday morning, Superintendent Mario Salinas said.
Those deposits were eventually sent out early Wednesday afternoon. Salinas said the delay was an aftereffect of a payroll snafu last week that left some employees overpaid and some underpaid, characterizing both incidents as the result of the district adopting a new payroll system for the first time in 30 years.
“We’re transitioning to a new payroll system and our staff is having some difficulty with some of the quirks of the system,” he said. “They’re learning it.”
Salinas says the district contacted the payroll system company’s leadership, which pledged to send consultants down to help district staff adapt to the new program.
“We don’t want to be Zooming,” he said. “They need to be present, on site physically, to help our staff to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Which — I can’t promise that — but having consultant experts on site I think will help a lot.”
Ultimately, Salinas attributed the incidents to human error using the system. The district is still rectifying some of the payroll errors.
“Many staff voluntarily came to our payroll offices to return the money and to clear up their accounts, and the other staff received a letter today indicating the process to pay the money back,” Salinas said. Some of those overpayments appear to have been significant. Board President Mike Farias and Edinburg American Federation of Teachers President Marsha Gonzalez both reported hearing from employees who’d received thousands of dollars more than they expected — they even said one received funds in the neighborhood of $30,000.
“Fortunately, a lot of the employees have already paid back,” Farias said.
The district experienced a third payroll error back in July that Salinas said was not tied to the new system. AFT President Gonzalez says the repeated errors haven’t helped the morale of a staff juggling the responsibilities tied to starting a new school year in the midst of a pandemic.
“This is kind of adding to their frustration,” she said. “They’re frustrated right now because this is something people have to contend with, because they’re already busy dealing with COVID.”
Gonzalez said some teachers were worried about the overpayments and fretted over calculating how much they would have to pay back. She encouraged them to work with administration to rectify those payments.
“Really it’s in the best interest of the members to go ahead and talk to payroll,” Gonzalez said. “So it’s really in their best interest to take care of it right away.”
District leadership emphatically said that the errors were internal and that Lone Star National Bank was not to blame for the delays.
“Lone Star had no fault at all with it,” Farias said. “It was a shortfall of the district in not getting the information to Lone Star in a timely manner.”
