False alarm — no pay discrepancies found at La Joya ISD
The La Joya ISD administration disproved the possible pay discrepancies linked to a data integrity issue that originated with the previous administration.
In February, Chief of Business, Finance & Administrative Services Mirgitt Crespo reported finding errors in salary data and years of service across more than 900 employee files.
Staff also found some employees had the phrase or code “do not increment” in their employee files. No one knew what it meant and couldn’t find any documentation explaining it. But Crespo stated that the coding implied that someone intentionally blocked or tampered with the files, potentially affecting those employees’ compensation based on their years of service.
Due to the inaccuracies and the mysterious coding, the administrative team had concerns that pay inequities compounded over time for the affected employees. As a response, the district conducted a thorough analysis to correct the errors. The district completed that analysis this month.
“We did a comprehensive case-by-case of all implicated employees, we gave the opportunity to every employee to respond to a survey showing them what we have in the system for years of service so they could challenge [and] verify all the numbers that we have in our system,” she said. “After they responded, we did a verification and a triangulation with data with documentation of what was in the system and what our employees were telling us. We went deep enough to go employee by employee regardless if they responded to the survey.”
Through the employee self-verification process, administration confirmed that the majority of the employee data was already accurate.
A total of 1,351 employees responded to the survey. Of those, 312 asked the district to review their employee data. Then, 123 of those employees needed to update documentation on their years of service.
According to Crespo, most of the updated files lacked documentation that the employee had not previously submitted, required verification of records from outside LJISD or needed clarification on years of teaching versus other school experience.
Once the district had all the correct years-of-service data, the administrative staff and the district’s legal team used it to determine whether the affected employees had been receiving appropriate compensation.
Through the analysis, the district found that it has been correctly compensating all its employees and there is no need for retroactive compensation adjustments.
The district also found no correlation between the “do not increment” code and the years-of-service errors in the employee files. However, administrative staff still can’t be sure what it meant.
“We are understanding that this probably is an internal code, something that somebody had access to and put it in there, [but] there is no finding of retroactive compensation necessary,” Crespo said. “We now feel more comfortable to strengthen the communication to ensure clarity and to be sure that … the system of record is accurate after verification of all our employees.”
The district has already implemented a system to prevent issues like this in the future, but the administration encourages employees to monitor their pay stubs and familiarize themselves with the compensation manual each year so they can report concerns.
