Carter Wrenn posted on February 08, 2010 09:44
I have stumbled across a state agency that’s more mismanaged than Lanier Cansler’s.
The Virtual Public Schools agency is (theoretically) leading North Carolina into the New Age of Internet education; students in rural areas will be taught in ‘Virtual Classrooms’ where they can learn anything from Chinese to Sanskrit – it’s technological innovation at its highest and it’s happening right here in the Old North State except for one small problem: The agency has a computer glitch.
The problem’s unusual: Public school teachers are paid a monthly salary – the State writes them a paycheck once a month; other state employees are paid either weekly or bi-weekly; but Virtual Schools instructors are paid quarterly – which has led to a terrible mess.
For example, let’s say Jane is a ‘Virtual Classroom’ instructor earning $5,000 a quarter; when the state fed her salary information into its computer, instead of calculating that Jane was making $20,000 a year and withholding accordingly the computer jumped the tracks and decided she was making $5,000 a week or $260,000 a year – and withheld as if she were making a quarter million dollars.
Which came a shock to Jane.
The obvious solution would have been to pay Jane monthly like all the other teachers, but the folks at School Superintendant June Atkinson’s Department said that would require more paperwork than they could bear.
The other obvious solution was to reprogram the state computer but the folks in charge of that (who work for Governor Perdue) said it was too much trouble and would cost too much.
Eventually, the powers that be got together and came up with a solution: To lie.
They told the Virtual Schools instructors they should claim more deductions on their withholding forms than they really had – which in theory would fool the computer into withholding less from the instructors’ paychecks so say, Jane, would be paid the right amount.
That a bit sounded unorthodox and a little unethical (after all, they were lying to the IRS) but, at least, it had the virtue of convenience – until the poor instructors went on line to fill out their withholding forms.
That’s when they found out instead of telling one little white lie and claiming, say, ten dependents they also had to provide names and addresses and social security numbers for each of their fictional dependents – which, of course, seemed outright dishonest. The instructors balked.
At that point it surely looked like the best solution was to fix the computer glitch – but the logic of government bureaucrats never runs in straight lines; instead of fixing the problem they jury-rigged the computer so the instructors could claim the dependents without giving social security numbers.
Over in Secretary Cansler’s department the Governor’s cutting medical care to elderly and disabled patients while she and Cansler can pass out $250 million in no bid contracts and over in the payroll department the Governor’s minions are telling Virtual Schools instructors to claim false deductions to get paid. Maybe the Governor ought to try that herself – telling the IRS she has ten dependents that don’t exist on her tax withholding forms.