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Fire Department payroll fixes continue; city to test NSS replacements and keep retro payments moving
Summary
LAFD officials told the council committee that overtime retro payments totaling about $5.9 million were issued March 19 and further batches are pending. The committee directed staff to proceed with a bake‑off of scheduling solutions to replace the Network Staffing System (NSS) and held the matter for follow‑up.
Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) officials and city technology and payroll partners updated a council committee on ongoing payroll problems tied to Workday implementation and the department’s legacy Network Staffing System (NSS). The committee received the report and held the item for a future meeting while staff continue retro payments and a planned evaluation of NSS replacements.
Emilio Rodriguez, Administrative Services Bureau, LAFD, said an initial batch of retro overtime payments paid March 19 reached approximately 3,400 members for about $5.9 million. Rodriguez said follow‑up batches are being processed for the May 14 payroll and that ongoing reconciliations require manual work to align historical timekeeping, NSS data and Workday labor rates.
Information Technology Agency (ITA) project lead Ed Magos said the number of open ServiceNow tickets submitted by LAFD has fallen from about 100 early in the remediation effort to roughly 60 at recent payroll cycles. Magos said many remaining tickets are individual‑level discrepancies requiring human reconciliation of HR and payroll records.
Workday contractor representatives said a temporary “Tiger team” of six Workday specialists helped process retros and introduce additional reports and integrations that reduced manual workarounds. Lisa Coulter (Workday) said the Tiger team implemented quality‑assurance reports that can flag exceptions before payroll runs, and that the work produced short‑term improvements; she said the longer‑term objective is to identify a scheduling successor to NSS with a clean integration to Workday.
Councilmembers and staff discussed hiring additional permanent payroll and HR positions to stabilize operations. LAFD officials said several authorized positions are in various stages of hiring: one senior personnel analyst has been selected and other positions (personnel analysts, systems analysts, personnel record supervisors, senior administrative clerks and accounting clerks) are being recruited or are awaiting eligible‑list activity. City staff warned that loaned temporary personnel have limited effectiveness for complex MOU calculations and that permanently hired staff are preferable for recurring payroll work.
On the NSS replacement question, LAFD’s chief information officer said ITA identified several contract vehicles that allow a “piggyback” procurement for scheduling products. The plan is to run an evaluation or “bake‑off” in which Workday and one or more third‑party scheduling solutions demonstrate how they would meet the department’s time‑tracking, scheduling and payroll integration needs. Officials estimated an integration for a third‑party scheduling product could take roughly 8–12 months once a solution is selected and the project is started.
Councilmembers pressed staff to continue immediate remediation to make firefighters whole while also moving swiftly on a durable NSS successor. The committee received the report, directed staff to proceed with comparative demonstrations of scheduling products that can integrate with Workday, and held the item pending further updates.
No formal policy action was taken at the meeting; committee leadership said the department’s commitment is to continue processing retros now and return to committee with the results of the bake‑off and hiring updates.
