DeKalb board presses administration after payroll errors tied to Munis ERP conversion

Chair DeCosta opened the Oct. 7 DeKalb County Board of Education meeting before a lengthy discussion of payroll problems tied to the district’s recent switch to a new enterprise resource planning system.

In a consolidated presentation, HR compensation lead Davis Mills said the district moved roughly 14,000 employees into the Munis platform this fall and has seen a mix of issues across recent pay runs: employees appearing with zero pay on some runs, variation in direct‑deposit records, paper checks required for some staff, and data‑entry differences that produced errors. She said roughly 51 employees had received duplicate payments that together represented about $150,000 and that about 300 employees had not received expected step increases. The compensation team described daily audit reports, additional pay runs and ongoing, targeted training as the principal fixes.

CFO Brian Schunemann said finance and payroll are running multiple payroll batches daily to capture missed payments and corrections. He told the board that some overpayments resulted from overlapping position‑control records and date‑range problems in the conversion process: if an old position was not end‑dated before a new one began, an employee could be paid on both records. Schunemann said the team is offering repayment plans for affected staff and that some employees who were overpaid have voluntarily returned funds.

Board members pressed for details. Board member Dr. Morley said she had not seen this level of payroll disruption in her 12 years on the board and urged immediate accountability and transparency for employees who incurred financial hardship. Vice Chair Pierce and others thanked staff for the daily audits and called for clearer communications and for the board to be updated with numeric follow‑ups. Turner asked whether the interim “dry‑run” and audit procedures that staff described will become permanent controls; presenters said the additional runs and post‑processing audits are being institutionalized while conversion kinks are fixed.

Davis Mills said the team has identified several causes that are data/field specific (dates, position controls, manual personnel actions) and estimated that some categories of discrepancies should be reduced to zero by the end of October with continued daily processing and reconciliation. Schunemann said the district is also monitoring related vendor integrations for withholding and third‑party remittances and that the fund balance remains sufficient to cover operations.

What happens next: the board asked staff for a written follow‑up with precise counts (e.g., how many employees remain unpaid or overpaid, and the dollar totals) and for evidence of outreach to affected workers, including copies of the hardship letters the compensation office provides to employees for lenders and vendors. The board left the payroll update on the record, with several members signaling they expect regular, numeric status reports until the conversion is fully stabilized.