By Laurel Druley STAFF WRITER

ELGIN B As the year winds down, Elgin School District U46 is scrambling to produce accurate W-2 forms with a malfunctioning computer system.

Dave Alexander, the president of the Elgin Teachers Association, demanded Monday night that the district hire an outside consultantto fix the computer problems.

ETA's crisis team already had found a consultant group to help clean up the district's PeopleSoft bookkeeping system, which was installed last year before Y2K problems hit.

The HR Priorities group already had given a presentation to district officials. Mary Smith, director of U46 financial services, said their plan described the "exact same methodology" as the district's new plan, which includes a time line, a long list of objections and how they propose to track them.

"I don't feel we need to bring in consultants again," Smith said. "To bring in outside people would slow us down. We feel we have the right plan in place."

The district plans to hire "an army" of accountants in December, paying them $3,000 a day for 12 days to review and verify all components of taxable wages for every employee.

Brian Booth, ETA vice president and a computer expert, pointed out to the U46 board that the district had to examine the paychecks of 540 employees a week for the next two months to make sure W2 forms were verified on time.

Booth speculated that the amount of errors reported for the Oct. 31 payday B 231 total problems reported, 121 fewer errors than the Oct. 13 payday B "was grossly underestimated."

He said employees told him that the few dollar errors that they're finding "aren't worth the hassle" of reporting them. And many employees "don't know if they are being paid right or not." Other staff members told him "they were afraid to report an error" because they didn't want their check messed up twice as badly as the first time.

In a presentation to the board members and a full room of U46 employees, Booth compared the district's payroll system to the Russian Kursk submarine tragedy B in which the Russian military purchased state-of-the art equipment, didn't have the money for proper training, refused to ask for outside help and waited too long before they admitted that they couldn't handle the problem.

On the last payday, "there was not one problem that we didn't have answers for," Freeman said.

U46's previous payroll system was replaced in January because the 18-year-old software was not Y2K compliant.

School officials say they regret not making more time to install the new system, which was purchased in May 1999.

"We intend to have 100 percent verifiably correct and accurate data for W2s," Smith said.

http://www.copleynewspapers.com/couriernews/top/e07payprob.htm

-- Doris (reaper@pacifier.com), November 07, 2000

Answers

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), November 07, 2000.