Dear Science Faculty & Researchers,
As you may be aware, in January 2020, UC Santa Cruz implemented UCPath, a new system for managing and processing payroll, benefits, and human resources. The implementation of this system has created significant additional workload for the Research Accounting (RA) and Academic HR (AHR) teams in all five of the academic divisions on campus. While we in the Division of Physical & Biological Sciences have recently added staff to both units to handle existing workload prior to the implementation of UCPath (largely driven by the substantial increase in extramural funding faculty and researchers have brought in over the last few years), we are not adequately staffed to handle the new work UCPath brought to our teams.
Due to UCPath, you may be experiencing delays in service or responsiveness from our RA and AHR units. The current primary focus for each of these groups is to ensure payroll information is entered correctly in UCPath so that all of our faculty, staff, and students get paid correctly each pay period. Our units have been committing a significant amount of time to maintain payroll accuracy and are trying as best they can to tackle their other work, like sending financial reports and responding to your inquiries.
We know this situation is untenable for you and our RA and AHR staff. We are working hard to rectify it by partnering with the other academic divisions to submit a resource request to CPEVC Kletzer to allow us to hire additional support staff for the RA and AHR units. If the CPEVC funds our request, it will be several months before we can hire additional staff. We will keep you updated on our progress on this initiative.
If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to Sarah Barron (srbarron@ucsc.edu) for the RA group and Nicolle Laird (nlaird@ucsc.edu) for the AHR group.
Sincerely,
Paul L. Koch
Dean, Physical & Biological Sciences
Distinguished Professor, Earth & Planetary Sciences