Worzels World - The sad case of Novapay

 

I try and steer away from straight journalism in this column. I prefer to deal with general issues. However the story of Novapay is, I think, worth telling. It is emblematic of the way we have been ill-served by Government and public sector agencies

Back when the state ran what was then termed the ‘public service’ (now ‘public sector’) such things as payrolls were dealt with internally. Post Office employee payrolls were prepared by the Post Office and teachers were paid by the Ministry of Education. The ‘restructuring’ and ‘reforms’ of the eighties and nineties advocated contracting out these services to private companies and corporations – the ‘private sector’. This has continued.

For eight years New Zealand owned and based company, Datacom, handled teacher pay without a hitch. In yet another example of fixing what isn‘t broken, a spat between Ministry of Education bureaucrats and Datacom management led the ministry to actively seek a service provider elsewhere.

A contract for an ‘updated’ payroll system was given to the Australian based Multinational IT company Talent2, who gave birth to Novapay. The contract cost NZ $182 million over a ten year period.

Originally schedluled for roll out in 2010, missed deadlines delayed implementation by over two years. Pre-release trials showed 'bugs' in the system. Government Ministers Hekia Parata, Craig Foss and Bill English were all informed of the faults, but along with advice from Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry for Primary Industries and the New Zealand Transport Agency all advised the system should go ahead. The system was launched mid-December 2012.

From then on teacher payrolls were a much publicised fiasco. Ninety percent of schools were affected. Some staff got too much, others too little, some none at all. In 2013 Government Minister Stephen Joyce was given the mess to sort out.

Over two years, and another $45 million later, the current payroll system, if not quite managing to match the levels of service Datacom previously provided, seems, at least and at last, to be getting the correct amount of money to the correct people.

In an irony that is more often the rule rather than the exception, the Ministry of Education through a Government-owned company, Education Payroll Ltd, are preparing the pay of their own employees once again. Anyone who has studied the KDC rip-off will recognise the same template for failure. Ministerial and Government agency incompetence, private companies and consultants milking the cash cow and the public footing the bill.

I can’t help but wonder if it might have been a better idea for the Ministry of Education to have kept doing it all along while they retained the expertise to do so, and by doing so saved a few hundred million. It would be difficult to mess up more completely than Novapay and the IBM-contracted INCIS computer system before it? Even if it did turn to custard, the money would at least have remained in New Zealand hands and flowed back through our local economy rather than being lost forever to shareholders of Aussie or US firms. But as a product of an older ‘outdated’ education system, what would I know?

Government now assert that many hundreds of teachers have been overpaid by a collective amount of $2.4 million and is threatening to refer the matter to debt collectors. I wonder if they will be a kiwi firm?

The Post Primary Teachers' Association launched a group legal action seeking compensation for "the hurt, humiliation and financial suffering caused by the dysfunctional payroll system."

Apart from this I could find no evidence of any attempt by Government to recover funds from Novapay.

What it is that drives our Government and her agencies (which currently gobble up a third of our GDP) to continually attempt to fix things that aren’t broken and throw large sums to offshore companies while so many New Zealanders are unemployed and our once broad middle class struggle to make ends meet? There is much that really is broken that is being ignored like falling standards of living, child poverty, and our national debt of $101 billion and rising. Yet we are currently conducting a referendum about a flag that also isn‘t broken?

In the wake of the Snowden revelations we know that our own and other Government agencies can produce software capable of monitoring and filtering all our cell phone calls and emails. Weta Digital have led the world in computer generated special effects, Datacom continues to thrive.

Finding a Kiwi company to prepare a payroll should have been a doddle. Our Government must be told that New Zealanders are actually capable if given half a chance. Perhaps though, due to hubris, they assume we are all as incompetent as themselves?

n prof_worzel@hotmail.com

In an irony that is more often the rule rather than the exception, the Ministry of Education through a Government-owned company, Education Payroll Ltd, are preparing the pay of their own employees once again.