Miami-Dade County launching audits of its glitchy payroll system – NBC 6 South Florida

Miami-Dade County’s new payroll system has been glitching, with some employees — from top executives to elected officials — being paid too much or too little, while others haven’t been paid at all.

The issue has been going on since last year, said the county’s Clerk of Courts Juan Fernandez-Barquin. Several audits will now be done to track down the root of the problem.

“I don’t want to blame anybody for this, I think this is something that potentially could have been avoided,” Barquin said. “I think that this is maybe a training error.”

The employees who haven’t been paid have or will receive lump sums. The ones who were overpaid are paying back the money through deductions in their paychecks.

Barquin himself had to pay back about $2,500. Commissioner Roberto Gonzalez recently received a whopping $34,000 in extra pay.

“The more I started asking around, the more I realized that this was a serious problem that was affecting at the very least, hundreds, and then I have come to the conclusion that it is definitely more than 1,000 people affected by this,” Barquin said.

County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava acknowledged the glitches in a new system and ordered an audit.

“Many of these pay adjustments are an expected part of the stabilization period of our new payroll system that we began implementing just last year,” Levine Cava said in a statement. “But we hope that the audit will help us to identify the root of the problem.”

The mayor also recently moved some of her executive staff into different positions in order to better deal with the situation.

On the county’s website, an entire section explains overpayments to employees with explainers on how to pay the money back.

“The employee does have the option, from my understanding, to pay the lump sum altogether, but at the very least, depending on what the agreement is, it gets automatically deducted from their next paycheck,” Barquin said.