MoD defends personnel system
This snippet appears on page 4 of the January issue of Government Computing magazine:--
“MOD defends personnel system
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has blamed payroll errors on its staff’s unfamiliarity with the Joint Personnel Administration (JPA) system.
The JPA was delivered by EDS and handles complex payments and allowances of the armed forces, 300,000 staff across the RAF, the Navy and the Army. They joined the system in April 2006, October 2006 and April 2007 respectively.
The MoD confirmed that between April and August this year38,529 service members were wrongly paid. But it said the system was working well and put the problem down to human error.
“ There are no widespread or systematic problems with the new JPA system, “ a spokesperson told GC. “ Input errors based on a degree of unfamiliarity with the new scheme have resulted in a small number of pay inaccuracies, and measures have been taken to provide additional training for HR administrators to prevent further problems.”
He added that accuracy rates since the full JPA roll out in April have averaged 99.3% and just 263 people were underpaid during October this year.
The spokesperson also insisted that if payments were not authorised within a certain time limit, they were automatically directed to a second line of authorisation.
He said: “JPA is a relatively new system which requires accurate and timely input from individual service personnel and HR administrators. As with anything new, a degree of unfamiliarity with both the system and the processes which support JPA has lead to input errors, which in turn has affected pay accuracy.” "
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