End of an era
Norman Green BSc, FBCS, CEng, CITP, FCIPP, reflects on a lifetime working in payroll M y first full-time job, which I started in 1972, was as a rebates and general assistant university. Unsurprisingly, on promotion to programmer, I was assigned to the team that maintained the systems used by
I did not look forward to several years with little more than maintaining the systems. So, the next job, which I started in July 1981, was with CMG. I worked on a worldwide health insurance system, sales and purchase order processing systems for a client in the secondary metals market. Less I thought that I had escaped payroll, I did some work on a free-standing statutory sick pay (SSP) scheme system just before the legislation became active. Then I supported order processing systems for an international pharmaceutical company. I spent a year on that project – travelling to the client’s offices each Monday morning, staying in hotels during the week and travelling home every Friday evening. I had a pager (there were no mobile phones as we know them today) and was on call out of hours to support the batch processing that happened when the online system was not being used which meant between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. During that year, CMG acquired the bureau business of Baric which ran on ICL 1900 machines. I was selected by the CMG management to support the systems (payroll and accounting) and transferred to CMG’s head office where responsibility of its own system rested. During that time, I joined the British Computer Society’s Payroll Group eventually serving as chairman for many years. That led to much engagement with HM Revenue & Customs and many other government departments discussing how new policy could be introduced
in the finance department of Gillingham Borough Council. The rebates for rents and rates (the latter a pre-cursor to council tax) are now known as housing benefits and are about to be integrated into universal credits. The Council took the concept of separation of duties very seriously so that those who calculated pay had no access to the wages packets – most of the weekly paid employees were paid in cash. Thus there was one set of finance department employees calculating pay, another set making up the wage packets and yet another set, of which I was one, handing out the pay packets. I would be driven to various places around the borough where the employees were working and in exchange for a numbered brass tally from an employee, issue a wage packet with the corresponding number. There would usually be a few pay packets uncollected (mostly because of sickness) and these had to be returned to yet a fourth set of finance department staff, thus maintaining the separation of duties. My next job was with Kent County Council in its ‘programming nursery’. Although I had written my first computer programmes in the summer of 1967 on an Elliot 903, this was the first time I was writing programmes to be used for real applications. The council had an ICL 1900 computer, which I had used at
the finance department and in particular, payroll, pensions and personnel systems. My next move was to the University of Sussex working in the finance department of the administration supporting all the ‘money’ systems including student accounts albeit in the days before tuition fees for UK students. The university had an ICL 1900 machine shared by the academics and the administration. Most of my time was spent supporting the payroll systems together with pensions and staff records which included reporting on teaching staff to central government as well as the more usual personnel functions. When the university was establishing itself, it tried to tap into the Brighton seaside trade by running its teaching terms as out-of-season as possible. That allowed the university to hire cleaners and caterers from the hotels and guesthouses. The waiting staff from hotels and restaurants were used to receiving tips and so the university ran a tronc system: the university was the tronc master and distributed the money evenly as it came from the university’s own funds. Eventually, the university changed its academic computer and the administration went its own way with a PDP11. That was a great time to see in new systems – still payroll, pensions and staff records – but onto a new computer. Yet, once it was complete,
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | December 2016/January 2017 | Issue 26 18
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