Extreme incompetence or lie?

August 5, 2008 by dave

When I saw this Sacramento Bee piece, it really caught me by surprise. As background, Governor Schwarzenegger announced the other day that he was going to reduce the pay of state workers to the Federal minimum wage until a state budget is finally signed. Now, State Controller John Chiang is claiming that it would take at least six months to implement this change in the state's payroll system and another nine or ten months to pay employees back.

If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to issue minimum-wage checks to 200,000 state workers in less than a month, he may want to rehire any semi-retired computer programmers he terminated last week.

The massive pay cut would exhaust the state's antiquated payroll system, which is built on a Vietnam-era computer language so outdated that many college students don't even bother to learn it anymore.

Democratic state Controller John Chiang said Monday it would take at least six months to reconfigure the state's payroll system to issue blanket checks at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour, though Schwarzenegger insists such a change should occur this month.

Experts say Chiang isn't joking when he describes the state's payroll system as a computing relic on par with vacuum tubes and floppy disks.

"It's an example of a number of computer systems in which the state made a large investment decades ago and has been keeping it going the last few years with duct tape," said Michael Cohen, director of state administration with the Legislative Analyst's Office.

This just doesn't ring true to me. Apparently, I'm not the only person who thinks this claim is suspect:

Fred Klass, chief operating officer for Schwarzenegger's Department of Finance, testifying Monday in a Senate hearing, challenged Chiang's description of his logistical hurdles.

"We have not been provided with the evidence that would show us that this is an impossibility, nor does it answer the question of why aren't we working on this for next time," Klass said.

"To some degree, it's not the point," he added. "The point is the law needs to be adhered to, and the governor is saying we need to follow the law. And if the controller is saying it's inconvenient, I think the controller needs to explain why inconvenience is a reason to ignore the law."

The state payroll system is based on the COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, programming language – a code first introduced in 1959 and popularized in the 1960s and 1970s.

"COBOL programmers are hard to come by these days," said Fred Forrer, the Sacramento-based CEO of MGT of America, a public-sector consulting firm. "It's certainly not a language that is taught. Oftentimes, you have to rely on retired annuitants to come back and help maintain the system until you're able to find a replacement."

Retired state employees who have returned to work part-time for the state were among thousands of workers laid off last week.

Forrer said the system has tens of thousands of lines of code, so it is time-consuming to find and replace salaries for each job classification on an individual basis.

Having done a little COBOL programming in school.... Yes, I'm THAT old... this just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You don't need to go through "lines of code" to change hourly wage rates.

COBOL applications like payroll are basically databases. In your database, you have a table (or file) with all the employees and another with all the wage and salary information. If they need to implement this change, they simply write a short COBOL program to go through the correct tables and change the hourly rate to $6.55 for the applicable employees. They can write another short program to keep track of how much they'll need to reimburse those employees when the budget is signed and even put that extra money in their next check and change the hourly rate back to normal.

Maybe I'm missing something, but none of this is rocket science. We're talking about functions that should take a week, not six months. I also find it hard to believe that all the COBOL programmers have just been laid off. If that were true, then the State Controller's office IT management should be fired. In any organization, one of your most basic functions is payroll. You don't run a payroll system for 200,000+ employees and not have staff on hand that know how to maintain it.

While I have great faith in the incompetence of my state government, I find John Chiang's claim that this software change can't be made in less than six months is just crap. It is an excuse. I don't believe that even our state government is this inept.

Permalink