An error was found in the Management Personnel Plan (MPP) salary report that was released by Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong’s office early February. The miscalculation showed that the university has spent $93,000 more on administrative salaries compared to last year.
The initial report had stated that there was a net decrease of $71,000, despite the fact that the administration had added 21 MPP employees.
“As our team continued to analyze the data, we discovered that there was an error in how a handful of employees’ salary information was reported in our system,” Armstrong said in a press release. “We also discovered a few transfers and replacements of employees that didn’t get fully accounted for in the initial report.”
In an earlier article by Mustang News, Armstrong had said that the decrease in overall salary was a result of the reclassification of positions within the levels of MPP, staff and faculty.
Even after the initial report was released, staff members continued to look over the data and detail, where they discovered the error, according to Cynthia Villa, Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance (AFD).
“When they prepared the report, we finished it, we compiled the data as quickly as we could and we got it out to the media,” Villa said. “Thereafter, I think they were still looking over the report, and realized that there was this error in the way that the replacements have been accounted for.”
This is the first year for Cal Poly to issue a MPP salary report, and all of the data compiled for it is done manually, according to Villa.
“Now that we have a predefined format and we know what we’d like to provide to the campus community every year,” Villa said. “We could work on it during the interim and ensure we have more a systematic and automated fashion to extract and report the data.”
AFD and the team who worked on the report were concerned about the error, Villa said.
“Our goal is to ensure that any data that we provide is complete and accurate, and that we can provide the president, the leadership of the university and the campus community the best and most accurate data that we can,” Villa said.