Thursday, January 10, 2013



The Novopay clusterfuck rolls on

Another week, and more fuckups from Novopay. This mess has already cost us over half a million dollars, but the real problem is that some teachers haven't been paid correctly for over five months. Which is absolutely intolerable. Isn't it time heads were put on spikes over this?

Also intolerable: Novopay's shit customer service. That second story reports that

Those trying to contact the Novopay service centre to report mistakes were forced to wait up to an hour and a half and 15,000 calls were unanswered or abandoned.

...which is par for the course for modern "customer service", but you'd expect that when Ministry of Education contracted with Novopay they included a requirement that queries were responded to in a timely manner (and if they didn't, time for more heads on spikes). This isn't even remotely timely - its just the usual tactic of piping everything to /dev/null in the hope that complaints will disappear. But when we're talking about people getting paid so they can pay the rent and have enough to eat, its just unacceptable.

How long is the government going to put up with this? Isn't it time the Minister - metaphorically speaking - walked into Novopay's office with an axe and did her best Conan the Barbarian impersonation? Or, less metaphorically, started activating the penalty clauses in Novopay's contract for non-delivery of service? Its her head or theirs. Time to choose.