MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The difference between 15,000 accounts being properly acknowledged by a computer on Black Friday was two blank spaces that were missing needed information, stopping the process of paying employees dead in it’s tracks.
“The employer designation was blank because they had become [West Virginia] Research Corporation employees,” WVU VP of Strategic Initiatives Rob Alsop said Friday on “Talkline” with Hoppy Kercheval. “When the wvOASIS system went to process it, it got to that empty cell and the computer system saw that as an incomplete submission and stopped the process.”
That, of course, was the glitch that led to all the missed payments on Black Friday.
“The computer system just saw it as incomplete,” Alsop said. “Oh gee, they don’t have the information to be able to make a payment on this, so we are stopping the process.”
This was just the fourth time this process has been run, which WVU officials concluded led to an unexpected issue. The problem has since been corrected.
“It’s not the wvOASIS system’s job to make sure that the data was full,” Alsop said. “It’s the job of the state agency to make sure it was fully processed.”
Alsop said they are also looking to code in an error message that automatically prompts if a similar error should occur.
“We did not receive that error message,” Alsop said. “We did look for it. And so we did have a person who is responsible for making sure that it was submitted, that it was received, and that it didn’t get any error messages. So we do have a person that does have that responsibility.”
The problem on Black Friday affected 11,507 of 15,021 accounts that should have received payroll deposits, said university spokesman John Bolt. It took until that following Monday to straighten out the problem, and employees received their pay then.