Some unionized state employees say the state’s new payroll system is not functioning properly and has led to error-ridden paychecks for multiple pay periods.
Statements released Thursday from three different unions representing state employees hint at ongoing issues with the rollout of the shiny, modern and long-awaited system — including missing wages, incorrect pay, and problems with overtime, benefits, and deductions.
The legacy payroll system went away for good in early December, its aging architecture swapped out for a new system anchored in the cloud-based software Workday. The payroll upgrade is but one aspect of the state’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) endeavor, which began implementation in 2023 and wrapped up last year, consolidating and modernizing the state’s payroll, human resources and other internal IT infrastructure.
While Workday does not handle support or configuration for the state system — that’s the responsibility of a separate state vendor — the unions have directed some of their ire at the software.
Rhode Island Council 94, which represents about 4,500 state workers and claims to be the state’s largest public sector union, released a statement that said missing or incomplete pay, mistakes in holiday pay or overtime, and deductions not hitting investment accounts were among the numerous complaints received from members.
“Workday is not working,” Council 94 President Michael McDonald wrote.
Council 94 Executive Director Alexis Santoro said the state has worked to correct some complaints, but then the union receives more each day.
The Rhode Island Brotherhood of Correctional Officers said in a separate statement that labor orgs representing “thousands” of public employees have heard member complaints for three consecutive pay periods. Like Council 94, the correctional officers’ union cited missing pay, underpayments, unpaid overtime and incorrect deductions.
“Correctional officers are doing one of the most dangerous jobs in state government,” Brotherhood President Richard Ferruccio said. “Violence is up, staffing is strained, and mandatory overtime is routine. Asking officers to shoulder those risks and then failing to pay them correctly, especially after three consecutive pay periods and right before the holidays, is completely unacceptable.”
Yet another statement came from SEIU Local 580, which represents frontline employees across eight state agencies. The same paycheck-related laments from other unions are contained in the SEIU news release, with the union’s President Matthew Gunnip claiming one documented case concerns “a member with nearly three decades of state service who is undergoing cancer treatment is now facing leave without pay because required documentation was not processed during the ERP transition.”
“When pay problems happen once, that’s a mistake,” Gunnip wrote. “When they happen repeatedly, that’s a breakdown. At this point, the risk and stress are being absorbed entirely by workers.”
“I’ve been in regular communication with the local unions representing state workers and they are very frustrated by the continued problems with state payroll,” Patrick Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO and one of the state’s top labor leaders said over email Friday. “We are ready to work with the administration to address the ongoing concerns so the problems are addressed.”
Workers’ frustrations have coalesced into demands for a formal hearing before the General Assembly’s oversight committees. Council 94’s McDonald said in his statement that the legislature’s oversight committees need to “start scrutinizing” and “facilitate an independent review of what went wrong” with the payroll rollout.
“Oversight is absolutely needed!” Rep. Julie Casimiro, a North Kingstown Democrat who serves as first vice chair on the House Committee on Oversight, said via text message Friday.
“How dare the state mess up at this time of year…or any time of year … on such a sensitive issue,” Casimiro wrote. “Some employees live paycheck to paycheck and may need to make a choice between heat or food…Will there be any accountability on this with the state employees overseeing this? We need answers … and our state employees need answers!”
The Department of Administration was responsible for the ERP rollout, and spokesperson Karen Greco said via email Friday that the state anticipated “adjustments” during the multi-year process to upgrade a system which she said covers more than 15,000 employees on payroll.
“The State is currently tracking about 1,700 open payroll-related tickets; we have closed almost 1,900 payroll-related tickets since the first checks were disbursed in early December,” Greco wrote, noting that some employees may have more than one ticket.
Greco said the state is prioritizing anyone who may have been underpaid, and “has made progress each week” by “issuing frequent off-cycle payments as issues get resolved to quickly provide any funds owed to employees.”
The department has cut off-cycle checks on six separate instances over the last month, Greco said.
An unsigned statement shared Friday by Workday noted that “modernizing decades of operations onto a single, unified platform is inherently complex — moving data and workflows from dozens of disconnected legacy systems, including manual and paper-based processes, into one modern system of record.”
Workday said it was “working closely with the State and its deployment partner to support this transition, and are fully focused on ensuring accurate and timely pay.”
Workday, however, is just the bedrock of software on which the payroll rests, and is not the state vendor responsible for configuring the software. The state’s website and project materials note that Accenture — a global consulting and professional services firm with offices worldwide, including one in Boston — is the implementation partner for its new enterprise infrastructure.
Accenture did not respond to multiple requests for comment Friday.
Payroll wasn’t built in a day
Like any ERP project of considerable scale, Rhode Island’s modernization for its enterprise software was not a singular task, and strategic planning began as far back as 2019.
State purchasing documents for a 2024 solicitation related to the software planning noted that, at the time, “nearly all” of the Department of Administration’s internal processing was still manual in nature, with timesheets submitted in hard copy or as PDFs.
The old system also ran on a mainframe and was based on the programming language COBOL, first released 66 years ago but revised many times over. Though practically ancient by coding standards, COBOL retains great utility and reliability in the colossal systems used by governments, banks and big businesses. According to IBM, it still powers 80% of in-person credit card sales and 95% of ATM transactions. Still, many organizations are now migrating away from COBOL as its most veteran practitioners retire.
During a March 2025 hearing at the State House, DOA Director Jonathan Womer outlined the herculean efforts the ERP entailed, even in tiny Rhode Island, with his department “going through 50-plus collective bargaining agreements and rules and regulations around payroll, primarily for employees.”
Womer also noted the importance of the project then: “We don’t have enough modern controls over our finances and financial transactions. We have been relying on typewriters and carbon papers for a long time.”
The state’s ERP website, which has been live since at least May 2024 per the “last updated” timestamps, includes numerous links, phone numbers, and information relating for state employees on the project.
The website noted that the changes would come in two phases: Certain internal finance operations would go live on July 1, 2025, while “human capital management” and payroll would come later in fall 2025.
The site also hosts a blog attributed to a mascot called Big Red, a Rhode Island Red chicken sporting blue-framed sunglasses that explains the ERP in lay terms across his blog posts.
“Currently, our HR, Payroll and Finance systems are lacking,” Big Red explains in one post. “We have siloed, outdated (downright archaic) systems, processes and tools that involve the use of paper forms and typewriters, minimal interaction between systems, and a gazillion custom reports all because we’ve got … siloed, outdated (did I mention they’re archaic) systems… well, you get the point.”
In a post from August 2025, Big Red promised the state was “taking additional steps to guarantee system functionality for everyone.”
“Remember when I said more testing – that includes enhanced payroll testing,” the post notes. “Money, money, moneyyy! We are running multiple parallel payroll tests to triple check the math.”
The chicken’s enthusiasm is not quite echoed in general discourse about ERP transitions, which are often regarded as intensive and high-risk projects.
A 2020 report from 18F, a digital services team working under the U.S. General Services Administration, warned that big governmental software projects have a low success rate, with only 13% of projects priced over $6 million seeing satisfactory completion on time and within budget. Success rates for projects under $1 million soared much higher to 57%.
“It’s counterintuitive, but spending more money on a project increases the chances of failure,” the report noted.
In 2025, Rhode Island’s enterprise planning project was priced at around $91.2 million.
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
