AUSTIN, Texas — The City of Austin said a payroll error occurred earlier this month, resulting in some employees being overpaid in their March 13 paychecks. On March 12, the city’s human resources staff notified affected employees that they had been overpaid by mistake.
The City of Austin uses a system called Workday, a cloud-based system that manages payroll. During routine updates, a non-required data field was left blank on a spreadsheet used to update job descriptions, which was uploaded to the Workday system. The system overrode the existing data with the blank field, according to the City of Austin. This was a marker that determined a position’s exemption status. With it left blank, the system then had conflicting information on how to designate the employee — exempt (ineligible for overtime) or non-exempt (eligible for overtime). The system treated each week in the two-week pay period separately and provided up to double an employee’s normal amount in the paycheck received on March 13.
A spokesperson for the City of Austin told Spectrum News 1 that staff identified the error, corrected the issue and put systems in place to ensure that the error does not happen again.
Spectrum News 1 reached out to the city on Tuesday to get further answers on how the city plans to get the money back. A spokesperson said that out of nearly 17,000 city employees, this error affected 675 employees with overpayments totaling $1.4 million. Employees will choose the number of pay periods in which to pay back, from one to four pay periods. Employees who must repay more than $5,000 will also have the option to repay by check.
Spectrum News 1 reached out to most of the Austin City Council members on Tuesday. Council member Marc Duchen sent us the following statement regarding the payroll error:
“I’m happy to see that this error is being swiftly resolved, but Austin’s taxpayers deserve better. Problems like these are why I pushed so hard for a citywide audit, and I’ll be discussing the matter with our city manager to confirm that other potential problems are identified and cost-effective guardrails are put in place. At the end of the day, my colleagues and I need to ensure that nothing like this happens in the future.”