Hon Steven Joyce
Minister Responsible for Novopay

7 May 2013

Govt releases PwC report on Pay Period 3

Minister Responsible for Novopay Steven Joyce today released the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report on complaints and notifications in regards to Pay Period 3 of the schools’ payroll.

Pay Period 3 of the new financial year, which was paid on the morning of 1 May, paid 87,812 people a total of $164.55 million.

The PwC report shows that complaints and notifications were received regarding 0.26 per cent of staff across the country, 27 staff were notified as not paid, 80 were overpaid, and 121 underpaid. Affected staff were from 166 schools or 6.8 per cent of schools in the payroll system.

“This is the best performance we have seen since PwC began tracking the performance of the individual Novopay pay rounds in February,” Mr Joyce says.

“The result was well within the 0.5 per cent steady state error level identified by the technical review team. Three of the last four pay rounds have met that mark.

“At this stage indications show that Pay Period 4 is likely to have a similar low number of issues.”

Mr Joyce provided an update on the work to clear software bugs as part of the Novopay Remediation Programme.

Since the start of the Remediation Programme, 426 bugs have been resolved – including 53 Category Two (very serious). However, 197 new bugs have been identified over the same period.

“In total there are 379 outstanding bugs, including 20 Category Two ones.. This compares to 526 as at March 19. So we are making progress but there is a way to go yet.

“In order to ascertain exactly how many ‘live’ bugs there are that are impacting on schools, a reconciliation process has been undertaken to separate them into three categories: those in the development environment, the test environment, and the live-production environment,” Mr Joyce says.

“What this work has shown is that 316 of the 379 bugs – including the 20 Category Two ones – have an impact on schools in the ‘live’ production environment and they are being prioritised for resolution.

“The target under the Remediation Plan remains to have fewer than 10 very serious bug defects by the end of June.”

Mr Joyce says clearing the backlog of outstanding issues from previous pay periods remained a priority with 100 people now working in the Backlog Clearance Unit (BCU) in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland.

“Around 9,800 issues have been resolved but new queues in relation to tax and leave balances have been added to the list for resolution, and more issues have been raised by some schools as they have been contacted,” Mr Joyce says.

Outstanding tickets now number in total about 25,000, and include issues relating to past overpayments, underpayments, non-payments, leave balances and 2012/13 tax reconciliations.

The BCU with the help of the IRD is expected to resolve nearly all known outstanding 2012/13 financial year tax issues caused by Novopay for school employees by this Friday 10 May. This is obviously an immediate priority for the Ministry and the IRD on behalf of affected staff.

“I want to continue to thank affected staff, school administrators and principals for their on-going patience and professionalism in what are trying circumstances,” Mr Joyce says.

“We are seeing progress – especially from pay period to pay period – but we still have a lot of work to do to resolve the backlog of issues of the last nine months.”

The PwC report for Pay Period 3 is available here.

ENDS

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