PAYROLL CHECKS ARE BOUNCING AT BISD...AGAIN

By Juan Montoya

By now, it has become par for the course that someone will drop the ball over at the Brownsville Independent School District.

If you were one of the 700 employees in the district who received your pay direct deposit and the creditors were paid automatically by your bank, that payment may not have gone through or bounced.

 According to a message sent to all employees by the administration, "Due to technical difficulties in processing the BISD biweekly payroll through the Automated Clearing House (ACH), the payments made to banks for our BISD biweekly employees were delayed last night."

The message further states that "The district has taken immediate action to limit any inconvenience to our biweekly employees by working with banks to ensure that the appropriate deposits are made today to the appropriate banks. The district will work with all banks to ensure that any fees caused by this payment delay are waived and that employees are not negatively impacted by this complication. BISD apologizes to the biweekly employees for this inconvenience."

This is the first time that the district has experienced a technical difficulty of this sort. All steps will be taken to ensure that it does not reoccur. For questions, call the BISD Payroll Department at 548-8391."

The last part of this self-serving email may not ring true to some of us who distinctly remember that under former CFO Tony Fuller in 2011.

At that time, three large checks caused 134 smaller checks on BISD accounts to be returned due to insufficient funds.
The large checks – for $260,000, $229,030.93 and $218,413.30 – did not bounce, but paying them caused 134 checks for smaller amounts to be returned due to insufficient funds, Chief Financial Officer Tony Fuller said.

At the time, Fuller explained that the large checks, which were issued at a time when BBVA Compass Bank, the district’s depository bank, was updating system software. System alerts that normally would have flagged the need to move additional funds into BISD accounts were removed during the software-updating process, Fuller said, which resulted in the overdraft problem.

This year, the depository is Wells Fargo, who has told the district it will waive any fees charged for the failure of the BISD to make the deposits. 

Now, what excuse will current CFO Lorenzo Sanchez have for the snafu this time?