To celebrate and promote the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) core values, the University launched this year the Presidential Core Values Awards, designed to recognize students, faculty, and staff who embody the seven values at the heart of UMB’s mission: accountability, civility, collaboration, diversity, excellence, knowledge, and leadership.
Accountability Award Winner: Payroll Team, Financial Services (Candace Chow, Glenda Habeych-Randall, Jen Qiu, Shanay Smith, Celeste Williams)
The Office of Financial Services’ Payroll Team (FS-Payroll) is recognized for its outstanding service to UMB, in particular for its efforts to implement a successful business protocol for payroll overpayments.
According to Glenda Habeych-Randall, assistant payroll manager, FS-Payroll identified in 2014 that overpayments on employee paychecks were a substantial issue and needed to be more properly managed.
“If we overpay staff that are funded by grants, for instance, we are overspending the grant,” Habeych-Randall says. “If we don't capture the overpayment, efforts will be out of compliance and will put the grant at risk. So if we catch the overpayment, we can first and foremost try to collect the funds back while satisfying terms of awards.”
By working with UMB leadership and legal staff, overpayment policies and procedures were formulated.
“By effectively and efficiently merging all of our efforts, we’ve succeeded,” Habeych-Randall says. “We have been able to recover at least 90 percent of the payroll overpayments, and the overpayment amounts have decreased substantially over the past year.”
The other members of the team are Candace Chow, manager; Jen Qiu, accountant; Shanay Smith, accountant; and Celeste Williams, processing associate.
Habeych-Randall says FS-Payroll led workshops in 2019 to help with the prevention and timely resolution of overpayment errors, and during the past year all but about $26,000 of $520,000-plus in overpayments are in a recovery process.
“We held payroll representative meetings and present generally on topics like ‘Reasons why overpayments happen’ and ‘How to prevent overpayments’ and ‘Procedures once discovered.’ The workshops have been really successful. We also have meetings one-on-one with individual schools that seek guidance on how to reduce their overpayments. We offer statistics and solutions to the problem.”
It’s all part of FS-Payroll’s commitment to providing professional and customer-focused support to the UMB community.
“We take pride in being considered a team that will always contribute to the University’s pursuit of excellence,” Habeych-Randall says. “Our team is committed to the idea of continuous self-improvement and taking initiative to deliver outstanding service that surpasses expectations.
“We accept this Core Values Award with pride and believe that it serves as a symbol of true teamwork,” she adds. “It demonstrates the potential for results when a department is working in lockstep, with each individual remaining accountable for their duties from the top down. I am proud of our team. This is big for us, and this is big for Financial Services.”
Honorable mention: Climate Change Workgroup, School of Nursing; Neal Gallico, School of Social Work; Jamie Hoots, School of Pharmacy; Lee Westgate, MSW, MBA, School of Social Work.
(In photo, from left, Jen Qiu, Celeste Williams, Candace Chow, Glenda Habeych-Randall, and Shanay Smith)