More than 140 graduate students received late paychecks last month due to administrative hangups, the Graduate School said.
The problem, which meant some paychecks due Jan. 30 were not issued until Feb. 4, was caused by several factors in "an alignment of planets," said Dean of the Graduate School Sheila Bonde.
An unfilled vacancy in the payroll department resulting from an employee's departure in November and late filing of administrative forms from graduate programs contributed to the problem, she said.
On Feb. 3, four days after the Friday when the paychecks of affected students were due, nine graduate students co-signed an e-mail to Bonde, President Ruth Simmons and other administrators on behalf of all the students who were not paid on time.
The students alleged that they had not received "any direct official statement as to why this occurred or when and how the issue will be resolved" and called the lack of communication "unacceptable."
Later the same day, Bonde replied in an e-mail to the students that the Grad School was "aware" of the problem and was "working full-bore" to fix the problem.
"We very much regret the inconvenience this problem caused you," she wrote.
Elena Tenenbaum GS, a student in the cognitive and linguistic sciences program and one of the affected students who co-signed the letter, was angered by the late payment, she wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.
Her paycheck is usually automatically deposited into her bank account and her bills are paid automatically from that account, but because her check was late, she overdrew on her account and was charged $99 in fees, she wrote.
"There should have been notice beforehand if there was going to be a problem so that we could have made alternate arrangements," she continued.
Heather Lee GS, president of the Graduate Student Council, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that "some graduate students around the campus do not feel their work is valued or recognized enough by the University."
"To them, one indicator is the recent paycheck issue," she added.
Bonde said Grad School administrators did everything they could to solve the payment problem as quickly as possible and acknowledged the inconvenience to students.
"Grad students depend on their paychecks," she said.
Employees at the Grad School collaborated to manually cut checks for about 140 affected students, said Brian Walton, the Grad School's associate dean of finance and administration.
Walton, along with the Department of Human Resources and the Payroll Office, "stepped into high gear," to get people their checks "as soon as humanly possible," Bonde said.
Because of the University-wide staff hiring freeze currently in place, Grad School administrators had to appeal to the Vacancy Review Committee to receive permission to replace the payroll specialist who departed in the fall.
They were the first group to make a case to the committee for hiring another payroll specialist, Bonde said, and have now hired a replacement who will start March 1.
The other major cause of the problem was late "appointment forms," Bonde said.
Graduate programs must turn in a form for each graduate student who will be working for them during the semester, and the deadline is 10 days before a payday.
"About half of the students affected were the result of a processing error and half were the result of late appointment forms," Bonde said.
The current system is a "paper- intensive" process, Walton said.
The Grad School hopes to streamline the process in the future and make it more electronic, he said, which might cut down on the volume of late forms, he added.
Daniella Wittern GS, another student who was affected by the paycheck issues, credited the Grad School in an e-mail to The Herald with working "really hard to cut every single one of those checks by hand."
"I don't think there is any question that once the problem occurred, the Graduate School did everything they could to resolve it as quickly as possible,"she wrote.
