One bad decision derails payroll system upgrade

I came into the tech world with a background in accounting and taxes — which makes me a very deadline-oriented person. After all, if a company’s taxes and SEC documentation are one day late, it can end up owing many thousands of dollars to the government. This money is not recoverable. If you’re responsible, you will end up definitively unemployed. When a tax or accounting project is filed, it’s done.

Back in 2004, our consultant team was hired by a company that operates a chain of retail stores. We were tasked with implementing PeopleSoft Payroll across multiple companies in a multistate environment. This would include transferring 110,000 employees from five different payroll systems such as Geac M, Geac E, Lawson, and so on. Obviously, the transfer process called for strict validation of the different state and local tax setups, as they migrated into PeopleSoft with dissimilar coding systems.

Not only that, each of four store-brand companies had 30,000-plus employees and more than 400 different mandatory work-location taxes that had to be validated on the legacy systems and then translated to PeopleSoft. It was a huge project, and many late hours and weekends ensued. Still, this was standard fare for the type of contracts our team accepted. We would work really long hours, make really good money, and then crash for a couple of months on some expensive beach. Visions of pina coladas danced in our heads.

With the go-live date approaching, our employer made a critical decision: We would not bother validating taxes for terminated employees in the legacy systems because the time and money needed to do so would put us way over budget. We pointed out that this meant invalid tax setups would be infecting the tax database, but the boss was not interested in our opinion.

As the project neared completion, our employers threw a large party. Open bar. Champagne. Flashing pictures. Finally the project was declared done. Over budget, but done. Before we could book our tickets to the Caribbean, though, the panicky phone calls started.

The problem, of course, was those rascally terminated employees. Everything would have been fine if they had stayed terminated, but many of them were getting rehired at our stores. The money we would have spent to validate terminated employees in the first place was chump change compared with the time and effort it was now taking to research and correct tax info for these employees in real time as they rejoined the company.

Initially, management was so furious, it threatened us with legal action unless we returned all the money we’d been paid. Then, when things calmed down (we’d kept all the e-mail messages), most of the team members were hired on as full-time employees. After all, it was too expensive to keep us working as consultants on a project that was technically done but was, in reality, endlessly operational. Six months later, after our team was interviewed by a senior management group trying to figure out what had gone wrong, one of the vice presidents stated, “There is done, and then there is done-done.”

We didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about, but we all knew what it meant: No beaches.