Media release

16 November 2012

Ministry Significantly Increases Payroll Staff For Novopay

The Ministry of Education has significantly increased its payroll staffing to help with the implementation of the Novopay payroll system.

Group Manager Rebecca Elvy, says the Ministry has doubled its dedicated payroll staff to help with Novopay and they are continuing to work with schools.

“We will continue over coming months to have the additional resources required to give schools the support they need, particularly in terms of the end-of-year and start- of-year reports.

“Talent2 has also increased its resourcing so they have what is needed to deal with all the processing and backlog, and to take calls from school payroll administrators.”

Ms Elvy says the move to Novopay meant the Ministry’s Education Services payroll requirements would need to be reviewed.

“We have always intended to continue with current staffing during implementation, and in fact have doubled those staff numbers. At the same time, we also needed to make sure we will have the right mix of skills and roles that would be required for Novopay in the longer term.

“As a result we formally advised staff in October that we would hold a review and had workshops and interviews with them to inform the proposal that we put to them at the beginning of this month.

“While we are continuing to receive submissions from the staff on the proposals, I can give an absolute commitment that all current staff will continue to have roles in an interim structure and that no decision will be made on a final structure until next year.

“That final decision will not be made until we have confidence that Novopay implementation issues have been addressed.

“We will proceed with a decision on the interim structure so it allows us to add some of the new roles that we will require, but it will also maintain all existing staff.”

Ms Elvy says she wanted to give staff some certainty about the future, which is why the Ministry decided to proceed with a process that would ensure it was equipped with the right structure for Novopay.

ENDS

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