So whose mistake was this?

Stuff reports:

A review is under way into how $85,000 was mistakenly siphoned from a Palmerston North school’s bank account by the Ministry of Education, forcing it into a $34,000 overdraft.

And was the Ministry at fault?

The ministry says a staff member was paid out of a “Teachers’ Salaries” account throughout the year but Ross changed the funding code so the staff member could be paid out of a “Bulk Grant” account, which was the school’s money.

“Schools sometimes do this as a way of managing their staffing allocation,” Education Payroll services deputy secretary Cathy Magiannis said.

“But when the school did this it made a mistake while entering an instruction into Novopay Online, which resulted in a reversal of the funding code for the whole year.”

So it was user error?

That’s like blaming the bank for going into overdraft, when you asked them to transfer too much money from your account.

Minister responsible for Novopay Steven Joyce released a report this week showing payroll processing was going well, with few complaints.

The December 10 pay run saw 92,962 people paid $227.95 million, with complaints and notifications received by 0.08 per cent of staff compared with 0.19 per cent at the same time last year.

0.08% is remarkably low.