Finance chief: Oracle payroll conversion produced ‘unacceptable’ errors; officials outline fixes and outreach

Janine Reed, Metro’s director of finance, apologized to employees and pensioners for pay problems created by the January rollout of Oracle Cloud and said the administration is working to resolve every outstanding issue.

"The issues we have experienced during this transition are not okay," Reed said, adding that finance, ITS, departmental timekeepers and contracted implementers are working evenings, holidays and weekends to fix errors. Reed said the steering committee made a risk‑based decision to go live Jan. 1 because Kronos and legacy systems were at end‑of‑life and delaying would have required extensive manual processing that would itself have posed risks to payroll, procurement and budget cycles.

John Griffey, the city’s ITS presenter, told the joint Government Operations and Finance committee that the conversion collapsed multiple legacy systems into a multi‑module Oracle implementation. He said integration and data‑conversion edge cases—such as employees with multiple active assignments or unusual leave records—surfaced only in production and contributed to incorrect pay for some workers.

Finance officials described a mitigation strategy that included daily off‑cycle or interim checks during the hypercare period, on‑site timekeepers for initial payroll runs, targeted post‑go‑live training and a consolidated issues tracker used to prioritize remediation. Deputy Finance Director Kevin Brown presented payroll metrics for Jan.–Mar.: about 2% of payments required off‑cycle processing (roughly 4,227 interim checks across all payroll cycles), producing an on‑cycle rate near 98% overall; biweekly government payroll averaged ~2.1% off‑cycle and pension off‑cycle checks ran about 3% during the two pension runs in the period.

Reed and other officials said a backlog affecting 40 pensioners had been resolved with checks issued and picked up in most cases; one pensioner remained pending because final paperwork arrived only recently and an interim check was scheduled. Reed said pension calculations had been delayed because pay elements must be configured as pensionable or non‑pensionable, and some elements were not fully defined at go‑live.

Council members pressed officials on communication failures and unresolved incorrect pay. Several councilmembers and employees told the committee that the stated off‑cycle percentage understates workers' experience because many front‑line hourly employees still report withholding errors, missing overtime, and difficulty reaching payroll or HR. Officials acknowledged phone and email overload, said they hired temporary staff to answer calls, mailed postcards to pensioners and sent an all‑employee email the day of the meeting, and pledged to provide department heads and council with a list of timekeepers and contacts.

Officials named Argano (formerly CSS) as the system integrator; John Griffey said Argano and an outside change‑management partner participated in the two‑year implementation and that Gartner reviewed the decision. Council members asked about the amount and performance under the integrator contract; officials said they were monitoring stabilizing work and would follow up with more detail.

Finance said it will continue to refine configurations, strengthen controls, validate changes and test for cyclical events that have not yet occurred (fiscal‑year close, audits, MNPS salary roll and year‑end tax reporting). Reed told the committee the administration plans to return with a stabilization update after the May 1 budget submission.

The committee ended with a public‑comment period in which several Metro employees from water, waste services, the library and schools described unpaid overtime, missing accruals and prolonged delays in obtaining answers; officials invited affected employees to remain after the meeting so finance and payroll staff could record names and pursue case‑level resolution.