Calder Cam: Urgent Debates — Teachers and Support Staff Payroll—Ministerial Inquiry into Novopay SystemText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCalder Cam: Urgent Debates — Teachers and Support Staff Payroll—Ministerial Inquiry into Novopay System[Sitting date: 04 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10653. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr CAM CALDER (National): Pay period 5 has just finished and in that pay period 88524 people were paid a total of $173.55 million. The PricewaterhouseCoopers report shows that complaints and notifications were received regarding 0.39 percent of staff across the country. Twenty-nine staff were notified as not paid 115 were overpaid and 199 underpaid. Affected staff were from 234 schools or 9.5 percent of schools in the payroll system. This is obviously unacceptable. This is totally unacceptable and theReport of the Ministerial Inquiry into the Novopay Project makes sobering reading. The inquiry was undertaken by the former Chief Executive of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet Sir Maarten Wevers and chairman of Deloitte Murray Jack. Their 113-page report contains 15 significant recommendations and was presented to the Government just last Friday. The ministerial inquiry team has produced a comprehensive report outlining the history of and issues within the school payroll system and it concludes that there were many factors over many years that contributed to the problems with Novopay.I understand that Peter Hughes the Acting Secretary for Education has written today to all school principals and board chairs to personally apologise to them. He has also written an open letter of apology to all staff in schools. I personally as a foot soldier in the National Government someone passionate about education and chairman of the Education and Science Committee express my sincere regret to all staff members who do an outstanding job throughout the country. Of course these problems have made their task a lot lot more difficult. We acknowledge that and the Government will be acting upon these findings.What were some of the key findings? Some of the key findings were to do with the project life cycle: “The schools payroll environment is overly complex as a result of an accumulation of historical changes. There was no serious attempt to simplify collective agreements or Ministry or school business processes before embarking on the Novopay project.”—the retrospectoscope is a hugely useful instrument in medicine and so it is in this instance—“This was an underlying cause of later problems. The strategic decision to change from purchasing software to an outsourced service was valid but the rationale was simplistic. Customers’ perspectives particularly those of the boards of trustees”—and I acknowledge Tracey Martin who has spoken earlier—“were insufficiently considered in the business case. The Ministry’s requirements for the outsourced service as outlined in the Request for Proposal were too high level to convey the full complexity of the required solution.” So as I say it is easy to be wise after the event but these are the results of this very in-depth and comprehensive report that we have received from two very able investigators. The report continues: “The process of gathering user requirements was poorly managed and took too long. The failure to involve users appropriately was a key weakness. The Ministry was negotiating on behalf of the users in the schools sector without an appreciation of all of their requirements.”One of the points that did come out was that the papers presented on 5 June 2012 to the Ministers following the so-called “Confidence Point Two” actually misrepresented the state of the project. It was found that “Ministers were not always well served by the quality of advice about the project from the Ministry. Reporting to Ministers was inconsistent and at times unduly optimistic and sometimes misrepresented the situation. In oral briefings to Ministers officials often expressed confidence and reassured Ministers”—who were asking the questions—“that risks were in hand … We were particularly concerned about the 5 June 2012 document which invited Ministers toapprove the Ministry’s Go Live decision. This report misrepresented the situation in two significant ways. It suggested that the Go Live decision was supported by three members of the ICT Council which was not the case; and it stated that Confidence Point Two criteria had been met when in fact a number either had not been met or were ‘deemed’ to have been met (a lower criterion).”