Hon Steven Joyce
Minister Responsible for Novopay

11 March 2013

Govt releases PwC report on Pay Period 25

Minister Responsible for Novopay Steven Joyce today released the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report on complaints and notifications in regards to Pay Period 25 of the schools’ payroll.

Pay Period 25, which was paid on the morning on 6 March, paid 84,822 people a total of $173.58 million. This was 6471 more staff than Pay Period 24 and was due to the seasonal growth at this time of the year.

The PwC report shows there were complaints and notifications received regarding 1 per cent of staff across the country. 286 staff were notified as not paid, 185 were overpaid, and 373 underpaid. Affected staff were from 406 schools.

Pay Period 25 data compares with 1.9 per cent of staff and 447 schools about which complaints and notifications were received in Pay Period 24 and 2.2 per cent and 628 schools for Pay Period 23.

“Early indications are that volumes of transactions will be smaller for Pay Period 26 because we are through the start of the year pay. All parties are working hard to complete processing ahead of the pay going through next week,” Mr Joyce says.

“The Novopay team are also preparing for Pay Period 1, which is the first in the new financial year and therefore will contain a number of significant changes including two: KiwiSaver and student loan deductions.

“Our next focus is to clear the backlog of issues that have built up during the first six months of the Novopay system.”

Today the new expanded Novopay Backlog Clearance Unit, which will be made up of 100 staff from the Ministry of Education and Talent2, will start clearing outstanding work from previous pay periods.

That includes salary assessments, calculation and recovery of overpayments, and the correction of errors from previous pay periods. Resources for the new unit will come from the $5 million remediation fund Cabinet agreed to last month to provide solutions on Novopay.

Mr Joyce said Talent2 undertook an additional software release over the weekend to address bugs in the system.

A total of 87 defects have now been successfully resolved as part of the remediation plan. The next planned release is on 22 March to address a further 146 significant bugs.

Mr Joyce says he expects to release the Technical Review report from reviewer Murray Jack within the next couple of weeks after it has been finalised and gone to Cabinet.

The Pay Period 25 report is available here.

ENDS

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