Some Ed Tech Perspective on UC’s Billion-Dollar Payroll System Fiasco

In 2011 the University of California laid out plans for a new payroll system called UCPath (for Payroll, Academic Personnel, Timekeeping, and Human Resources). The goal of the $170 million project was to save a reported $100 million per year eventually and to replace a 30-year-old Payroll Personnel System (PPS) that runs separately for each of the 11 UC locations with Oracle’s PeopleSoft payroll and HR systems. All systems were planned to be live by the end of 2014 and run centrally in a new UCPath processing center.

In 2014 we described how the project had grown from $170 and 36 months to $220 million and 72 months. In spring of this year we described how the project was planned to cost $504 million and take 93 months (almost five years longer than originally planned).