Maybe, Just Maybe, It's Because the District is Too Big, and the Union Rules Too Restrictive . . .

. . . a continuing massive breakdown in a payroll system installed more than six months ago for LAUSD.

The whole thing is one nightmare after another, but the tone of the article is, 'these poor folks', 'too bad this stuff has to happen', 'they just need to spend even more money to fix the problem', etc.

$95M for a payroll system that doesn't work is absurd. $45M in overpayments to 28,700 employees, mostly on June 5th alone, should be a bigger scandal than it was.

To paraphrase James Carville, it's the bureaucracy idiotas.

When schools complain about not having enough money to pay teachers, maybe they should first figure out how to pay the teachers like any other company would. And I'll bet you any amount of money, that if Deloitte Consulting were contracting to upgrade the system for a similarly sized private company, that A) they would have been bid down to about $10-15M for the project instead of $95M, and B) it would have worked first time out or Deloitte would have had to spend their own money to fix it, and C) Deloitte would have worked with the Human Resources department of that company to fix the system from the ground up rather than try and kludge together a computer system to fit around the rules that already existed in place, and D) Wouldn't still be facing these sort of problems six months after the initial roll out of the system.

I'm guessing union intransigence and typical bureaucratic nonsense are responsible for 80% or more of the expected cost of fixing this problem (which given that they admit to spending $95M and look to spend tens of millions more). I'm thinking somewhere around $100M will be overspent to fix this problem they created. That's money that didn't go to learning, didn't find its way into teachers pockets, and taken directly from local, state and federal taxpayers. With a student body of around 700,000 that breaks down to a paltry $143 per pupil, so I guess it's no big deal, maybe they should go ahead and waste another $100,000,000 fixing this and take another $143 per kid away from the classrooms.

Funny how the LAT can manage to keep a mostly neutral and sympathetic tone while reporting on a story like this (I sense no finger pointing, just sympathy for the poor teachers who aren't getting paid properly), but write a story on some stupid puffed-up Congressional investigation into the Executive branch and objectivity gets thrown out the window.

(Given the photo used to illustrate this story, and the fact that the phrase, "hardest hit" is actually in the story, I could have titled this, "Bureaucrats Screw Up, Minority Women Hardest Hit . . .")

Bravo to Deloitte Consulting for milking this scam for all its worth (way to increase shareholders value!), and a boo and a hiss to the LAUSD Superintendent for gross dereliction of duty.