Weinberg freshman Lauren Ramm did a lot of walking Winter Quarter. And not because she loves the winter weather.

In a quest to be paid for her work-study job as a tutor in the America Reads program, Ramm walked three individual trips to both the Northwestern payroll office on University Place and the work-study office on Hinman Avenue.

“Whenever I went to one, I was sent to the other,” said Ramm, who started working early in Fall Quarter but didn’t see her first paycheck until March 6. “Everybody I talked to (about getting paid) said it was somebody else’s job.”

NU’s approximately 2,000 work-study students have faced the same problems. Although payroll always faces staffing turnovers and miscommunications, the implementation of new payroll software several years ago and the Student Enterprise System two years ago forced NU’s business staff to relearn standard business systems. As a result, many students – typically in their first work-study year – were paid incorrectly or not at all during the Fall and Winter quarters.

Ramm first started searching for her paychecks shortly before Thanksgiving break, when the standard four-week turnover period for a work-study student’s first check had passed. When Ramm continued to find her mailbox empty on Friday afternoons, she went to payroll, where she discovered she was missing the proper paperwork.

“Since I hadn’t heard anything about them (when I started my job), I assumed that it was taken care of with something I had filled out during the summer or when I had originally requested financial aid,” Ramm said. “I had not been notified that I had stuff missing.”

At payroll, Ramm completed the paperwork – two tax forms, an Immigration and Naturalization Services I-9 form, a work-study authorization form and a personal data form – and provided the necessary identification. But she ran into another snag: She had not been entered into the computer as an employee.

After payroll offered her no solution, Ramm walked back to the work-study office and reported her dilemma. She was told that it was payroll’s job to process the forms.

“I walked back to payroll and reported this,” she said. “(After that) I decided to wait and see what happened.”

And nothing happened. Before the end of Fall Quarter, Ramm went to the offices again. Still, by the quarter’s end, Ramm was not paid for the 10 hours a week that she worked.

After returning from Winter Break, Ramm approached former work-study coordinator Mary Wegerzyn. Wegerzyn, who had Ramm’s biweekly time sheets on file, had her fill out the NU personal data sheet again to ensure Ramm could be entered into the system.

“I assumed that the problem would then be fixed,” Ramm said. “But I wasn’t paid at the end of the next pay period.”

Two trips to the payroll office later and nearly seven months after starting her job, Ramm finally received a check – for seven of the 80 hours that she had worked.

“The whole thing was very annoying,” said Ramm, who now receives her checks regularly. “It’s really hard to get yourself to go to work when you’re not getting paid, especially because work-study is so flexible.”

Initial entry of student data into the payroll system is problematic because paperwork travels through numerous avenues before reaching payroll, said Litsa Rofalikos, a finance department assistant in the University Athletics Administration, who oversees payroll for about 35 work-study students.

“Once (the students) get into the system, we’re OK,” she said.

Upon completing the initial paperwork, students return it to their employers, who then submit it to payroll. Rofalikos said that she’s seen initial paperwork take up to four weeks to be entered into the system.

“When you have that many different components, things are going to get confusing,” she said. “(Students) calling me a month later to tell me (that they haven’t received a paycheck) makes it worse.”

According to Wegerzyn, information from the tax forms can be entered immediately into the human resources computerized payroll system. But because of payroll regulations, information from a student’s personal data form can’t be entered until payroll receives the student’s first completed time sheet, she said.

Betty Scott, manager of operations at Sports Pavilion and Aquatic Center, said that although the 175 student employees that she supervises did not have major paycheck problems this year, she has seen problems result from a backlog of paperwork. Although work-study students swipe their Wildcards to track hours electronically, the printed electronic record is sent to payroll and manually keyed into the human resources computer system for payment.

“A big part of not getting paid on time is the student not turning in the (initial) paperwork on time,” Scott said. “A lot of the problem is payroll. They just have piles of things there. A lot it has to do with disorganization and personnel turnover.”

Payroll office manager Elizabeth Gladic declined to comment on this story.

Adam Tarnoff, a researcher for an organization called WorldWatch, oversees eight work-study students who work in Annenberg Hall. During Fall Quarter, some of his employees did not receive checks on time because their paperwork was lost after Tarnoff submitted it; other students were paid at the wrong hourly wage or for the incorrect number of hours.

“There appears to be no clear procedure for students to follow when they have difficulties with their paychecks,” Tarnoff said. “Even if someone is able to identify the problem, it is not always readily apparent how to resolve the issue.”

Carolyn Lindley, director of financial aid, said that staff turnover is a particular problem for work-study jobs because supervisors often are as new to NU’s work-study program as are first-year work-study students. Students and supervisors often don’t know the proper procedures to follow when paycheck problems surface when they miss the information sessions presented by the work-study office during new student week.

Small staffs like Tarnoff’s are not alone in dealing with payroll problems this year. Personnel librarian Peter Devlin said that about 80 percent of 250 students working at the University Library had some problems with their checks, from being paid the wrong rate to not receiving checks at all. Most problems were corrected by the end of October.

Devlin said that although there seemed to be more work-study/payroll problems this year than in the past, payroll problems always exist because employee information and hours must be manually keyed into the human resources computer system.

“The people at payroll try to get everything keyed in correctly in time for the first payroll, but sometimes that doesn’t work,” Devlin said. “It’s not even their fault. A lot of normal error comes with that kind of detailed work.”

Devlin said that he believes a university-wide electronic time-keeping system will eliminate much of the human error in the current system.

In October NU will begin implementing the Electronic Time Entry system, which will end manual keying of hours into the payroll system, according to the NU Human Resources Web site. Human resources business analyst Valerie Van Haaften, the Electronic Time Entry Project leader, declined to comment on the proposed system.

Lindley added that changes in staffing and new means of communicating the payroll process to work-study students and employers, like providing additional online checklists for work-study students, will allow the system to run more smoothly next year.

“There are always problems at the beginning of every year with kids getting paid. It’s just the nature of the beast,” she said. “Not everything is going to be perfect, (but) we think we’ve got some things in the works that will be really helpful. We want to make sure kids get paid.”

And not all work-study students had paycheck problems this year. After four years on work-study, speech senior Kim Ordzowialy, an Academic Technologies consultant leader, now receives her paychecks on time after initial troubles with incomplete paperwork freshman year.

She also offered advice to students with similar problems. “Go directly to the payroll office. (The problem) seems like it stems down to their philosophy of ‘we don’t tell anyone.'” nyou