A payroll system error led to one Central Texas city overpaying hundreds of employees by more than $1 million. The news triggered dozens of reactions from Austinites on social media, some of whom jokingly wished the same would happen at their own jobs.
The City of Austin mistakenly overpaid 675 employees by $1.4 million earlier this month due to an issue with the city’s Workday payroll system, according to a statement from a city spokesperson. City officials are now working to recover the money through repayment plans.
“Staff identified the error and have corrected the issue,” a city spokesperson said. “Paychecks for this week’s pay period are correct.”
This error impacted employees’ March 13 paychecks. Austin Human Resources staff notified impacted employees on March 12 that they had been overpaid by mistake. The City of Austin uses Workday, a cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning system, to manage several areas, including benefits, compensation, payroll, and recruiting.
The city said during routine updates to Workday, a non-required data field was left blank on a spreadsheet used to update job descriptions, which was uploaded to the Workday system. This resulted in the system overriding the existing data with the blank field and that marker determined a position’s exemption status, per the city.
“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 city spokesperson said in a statement. “The system treated each week in the two-week pay period separately, and provided up to 2x an employee’s normal amount in the paycheck received on March 13.”
The city added that its Human Resources staff are now working on a repayment plan that would allow those 675 employees to return the overpaid money over a specified period of time. When the Austin American-Statesman shared the news Friday, March 27, in the r/Austin subReddit, the post garnered nearly 60 reactions from residents who were quick to share their thoughts.
Reddit user MoKush420710 responded with a meme of a man saying, “Jesus, I see what you’ve done for other people, and I want that for me,” and AdventurousTime wrote, “crawfish boil on me y’all !”
Another Reddit user, DarthVader1701A, did the math to show how much money each employee was overpaid and said, “That averages out just over $2,074 per person.” Others commented on the city’s system itself, Workday, with one user, Sneakylumpia, writing, “classic Workday shenanigans.”
Twisted Memories added, “Keyword, company. This is the City of Austin, a government entity, and that extra money technically belongs to the citizens of Austin. It’s the city’s responsibility to ask for it back.”