Due to the ongoing work of the PSU-AAUP faculty equity task force with HR on the salary study, 2018 COLAs for instructional and research faculty members will be delayed. COLAS for Academic Professionals, however, will not be delayed.
We reported on January 5 that HR had a process in place for the implementation of the faculty equity increases in conjunction with the 2018 COLAs, and HR sent a similar communication.
The PSU-AAUP faculty equity task force numbers subgroup has been working diligently to review HR's spreadsheets, but there continue to be many problems. First, there are some Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) codes that are wrong and some of those errors seriously skew the amount of equity adjustments a few faculty members would get from the available funds. There also continue to be some problems with the formulas for some fields in the spreadsheets.
HR needed a decision today, January 12th, by 12pm- the cutoff time for the January 31 paycheck- on whether to implement the equity increases for 2017 as they exist in the spreadsheet or to wait. We believe that the errors, if paid on January 31 check (with 2018 COLAs for 12 month employees), would be so pervasive that HR might end up having to make corrections to a majority of the checks issued. That did not make sense. We have to make sure the checks are correct when they are issued and you do not end up having to repay any money that HR paid out in error.
Do to these issues, we encouraged HR to not attempt to pay increases on the January 31 paycheck so that all errors could be fixed and the increases be paid correctly when paid.
HR will pay the salary increases in the order of operations previously reported, and any COLAs that were due on this paycheck, when paid, will be paid retroactively.
We know that 12-month members were counting on increases to begin in this check. We deeply apologize for the inconvenience. We are working hard to ensure our next report on this matter is that everything is fixed and ready to go.
EF 1/12/2018