The future of Novopay

Stuff reports:

D-Day looms for the trouble-plagued Novopay school payroll system.

A decision on whether to ditch Australian providers Talent2 and possibly give the contract back to Datacom will be announced soon.

A spokesman for Steven Joyce, the minister charged with sorting out the pay debacle, insisted yesterday a decision had not been made, but the Government has previously signalled a decision by the end of the month.

Talent2 chief executive John Rawlinson could not be contacted for comment.

The company has been forced to hire extra staff and work round the clock to try to fix the bugs, which have numbered in the hundreds and left some school staff without pay for months.

The latest pay round showed there was still a long way to go.

There were 39 staff not paid, 210 underpaid, 142 overpaid, 264 schools affected and 123 bugs resolved.

Far from a long way to go, that is an error rate of around 0.4% – less than under the previous system. That context would be useful.

The system is still damn buggy and I don’t think it will be deemed acceptable until school staff are able to enter in all staff details themselves, and confirm the details are correct. Once they have achieved that, they won’t need the expensive call centres doing so much manual work.