PAYROLL
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — As of 5pm today (Thursday), state employees identified to the State Auditor’s Office by the various state agencies have been loaded into the payroll system and have had a payroll check generated ahead of payday Friday.
More than 37,000 employees have been processed. It took a tremendous effort by payroll administrators across state government to manually input most of the information. This was a critical component of our contingency plan, which was activated following a ransomware attack on UKG (formerly known as Kronos), the private company contracted to administer the state’s time and leave system.
On Monday, wvOasis uploaded the payroll information from the state agencies into the system. The State Auditor’s Office immediately got to work on identifying any red flags. Because of the contingency plan and hard work by many across state government, 98% of the paystubs had no issues.
Of the some 140 state agencies impacted by the Kronos outage, there were no or only very isolated issues amongst most, which were quickly resolved. We did, however, identify concerns that impacted two agencies. Since Monday, members of the State Auditor’s team, along with wvOasis, the Governor’s Office and the State Treasurer’s Office, were working around the clock with payroll administrators in DHHR and DMV to address these anomalies. The concerns were resolved and the employees who were identified were uploaded into the system.
The State Auditor’s Office then began the next lengthy step in the process of printing paper checks for the small percentage of employees who were identified during our review. Each agency has received the checks for their impacted employees and have a plan to deliver the checks to their employees by Friday, with many of those deliveries happening today, ahead of payday. Every other employee will see their paycheck deposited electronically into their bank accounts, as usual.
We again want to thank everyone for their dedication and hard work to overcome this challenge.