Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce announced yesterday that the government would maintain the struggling Novopay payments system for teachers, despite numerous and continuing problems since its implementation. He said that the government would continue working hard to iron out the remaining issues, but in the meantime he is encouraging teachers overpaid by the system to be charitable toward those who’ve been underpaid.
He suggested that overpaid teachers do this by giving the excess money they were paid to those teachers less fortunate.
“Basically, we have a situation where the money is in the wrong place,” said Joyce. “If we just, sort of, move it around, and put it all in the right place, we should be sorted.”
Joyce accompanied his explanation by moving his hands in various directions to demonstrate the vague concept of moving things. He suggested that “someone” or “whoever” set up an online exchange where teachers could get in contact with each other and swap money to even out their pay cheques.
“We’ve got situations where some teachers have been overpaid maybe, six hundred, seven hundred dollars or so, and situations where some teachers have been underpaid by thousands. If some of those overpaid teachers would just front up, say, ‘here’s some money, who wants it?’, then we might be able to do something.”
“Or not,” he added. “I don’t know.”
Asked if the government would set up an exchange for teachers to do this, he said that he was currently talking to Novopay developer Talent2 about the possibility of designing another program to do that.
“It would be some sort of nationwide, automated payments system,” he said.