Significant difficulties with introducing a new payroll system at Swindon Borough Council last year have been criticised by the council’s official auditors.

Auditors from Grant Thornton presented the report into their checks of the council’s books and systems for 2021-22 to the audit committee this month.

And the first recommendation the report makes is to fix the problem with the payroll system.

It says: “Our work has highlighted a significant weakness due to the in-year change of payroll provider.

“There remain a number of issues relating to the implementation of the new payroll system that are still to be resolved.

“We recommend the council should ensure sufficient resource is in place to resolve the ongoing payroll issues, specifically that timely and complete information is able to be produced for the payroll system and that outputs, such as payslips are accurate.

“The council should also ensure it undertakes a review to learn lessons from the procurement and implementation of the new system to ensure that other system changes are managed more effectively.”

The report acknowledges that the Covid-19 pandemic was a major factor in shortened timescales for a switch of payroll providers which seems to have caused real issues.

It says: “The implementation of our new payroll system was less than ideal and our staff that were affected were incredibly patient while we worked to resolve the problems.

"It had been the council’s intention to carry out a full procurement exercise in 2020. That exercise was not carried out to the original timescale due to the impact of the pandemic.

“When the procurement took place, the council awarded the contract to Civica HR in September 2021. Delays to the procurement resulted in a truncated implementation timetable.”

It adds that the council was aware this would be a problem but had little option but to continue as the previous payroll supplier “was unwilling to continue supplying payroll only services at a cost that was acceptable to the council".

After the change to the new system began in January 2022, the auditors say: “The transition period was beset with a number of issues including significant and numerous errors occurring on payroll runs between January and July 2022.”

A spokesman for the council acknowledged the problems but said they were now fixed and an auditor’s recommendation had been put in place: “We are confident the issues we experienced last year are now behind us and monthly governance meetings are in place to ensure we regularly monitor performance and take on board the lessons learned from the Audit report.”