Chief Carla Denise Armbruster Edwards, who oversees administration for the Office of the Mayor, told the Miami-Dade County Appropriations Committee that a payroll audit stemming from errors discovered in August 2023 has produced measurable fixes but still requires ongoing work.

The August 2023 errors ‘‘was a result of the system not being fully implemented and used at its full capacity,’’ Edwards said, adding that the county’s PeopleSoft human-capital-management (HCM) deployment lacked some auditing functions and standard operating procedures at the time. The county’s internal compliance department completed an audit in November 2023 and identified 40 issues; Edwards said 39 of those items have been resolved and the county is tracking the remainder with a ‘‘stoplight’’ report.

Why it matters: payroll errors affect thousands of county employees and elected officials and can require lengthy recoveries or corrections. The committee heard that the county will continue system updates and operational changes intended to prevent repeat problems and limit the human errors that contributed to the 2023 failures.

Edwards described a number of changes already made: tightened security access, new standard operating procedures and training, system triggers and exception reports to flag anomalies earlier, and a planned change to make pay periods retrospective rather than prospective so pay reflects actual hours worked before checks are issued. She said the planned South-to-pay change is a significant step and flagged training and continued process improvement as outstanding needs.

Barbara Galvez of the Office of the Clerk and Controller told the panel the clerk’s office is monitoring payroll and recently worked with county administration and Oracle, the system vendor, to analyze infrastructure and process improvements. Ophelia Tamayo, director of the internal compliance department, said the audit work examined a large transaction set and then a testing sample and that the audit’s findings showed both system and human errors.

Tamayo told commissioners that, ‘‘at the time when we pulled the information as of 2022, there were actually already 4,000 county employees that had overpayments identified for a total of $3,200,000.’’ She said that figure reflected a snapshot from the audit reporting period and that the auditors sampled roughly 265,000 payroll transactions to reach their findings.

Committee members pressed for a timetable and oversight. Edwards said the administration will provide a stoplight update every six months and is engaging the clerk’s office for a comprehensive follow-up audit to ensure nothing was missed. The administration is also issuing an RFP for outside consulting support, recruiting additional audit staff, and analyzing whether further investments in licensing or contractor support (including potential extensions of existing contracts) will be needed to stabilize and modernize the PeopleSoft deployment.

Some commissioners urged faster and broader training and suggested looking for ways the commission can assist with resources and legislative coordination with unions; Edwards said many planned process changes will require buy-in from collective-bargaining partners and the clerk’s office. The committee did not take a separate vote on this presentation, but members recorded support for continued audits and updates.

Ending: Officials said the system is more stable than it was at the time of the 2023 audit but warned that recent underpayments underscored remaining risk. The county committed to continued software updates, broader training, monthly/biannual reporting, a comprehensive audit in partnership with the clerk’s office, and continued work to change payroll processing from prospective to retrospective timing to reduce future errors.