Written by Tempers finally boiled over at last night’s council committee meeting. What started as a routine update quickly turned into a heated debate over the city’s disastrous switch to the ADP payroll system.
The “Swamp-Fox” team at Marion Watch has been digging into this for weeks, and the findings are grim. We’re talking about city employees—the people who keep our streets safe and our water running—opening their paychecks to find they are short hundreds of dollars or that their final checks of the year are riddled with errors.
With tax season officially here, the big question last night was: Will city workers even get their W-2s on time, and will the numbers be anywhere near accurate?
Council members, feeling the pressure from their constituents, grilled officials on why this transition has been such an “unexpected” train wreck. It’s no longer just a “hiccup.” It’s a full-blown crisis that is hurting the people who work for this city.
Councilwoman and Finance Chair Twila Laing issued the following statement early this morning:
The city did not cut the payroll position due to budget cuts or anything to that effect.
The payroll clerk quit!
And their was NO ONE else trained to do payroll. The auditor had ZERO experience in payroll and she decided that she would do it. Until she could get someone hired.
That could have taken a couple of months.
At the time there were already SEVERAL ISSUES of concern reconciling the books with Veritas, the IRS filings and penalties, the police and fire pension, and all the uncompleted audits from 2021 to 2024. Administration felt that hiring an outside firm such as ADP would relieve some of the pressure from the auditor and allow her to focus more on the pressing issues at hand. The auditor was not involved in the beginning meetings with ADP, and her failure to communicate and doing proper testing prior to going live would have eliminated some of these issues that we are currently seeing with payroll. This Administration and Council have tried to communicate and offer assistance with the same result every time, her refusal to accept. The situation just snowballs and becomes worse creating what I believe to be a hostile work environment for other city employees.
Miranda is in over her head.
Why IT Experts Are Calling “Bull” on the Auditor’s Excuses
City Auditor Miranda Meginness is trying to play this off as “unforeseen technical glitches,” but to an IT professional, this looks like a textbook case of professional negligence. We have confirmed through council members and local citizens that the city skipped the mandatory testing phases entirely. Where did this information come from?
Sources close to and inside the Auditor’s office!
When an IT professional looks at a failed system launch, they don’t just look for “glitches”—they look for a paper trail. Here is how an expert knows the City Auditor is likely hiding the truth about the lack of testing:
- The “Missing” Parallel Run Records: Standard protocol requires a city to run the old system and the new ADP system side-by-side for at least two full pay cycles. This is called a Parallel Run. Professionals then generate “Reconciliation Reports” to compare the two systems. If employees are seeing $500 shortages and massive errors now, it is forensic proof those reports don’t exist. You cannot have a “successful” parallel run and “unexpected” errors at the same time.
- The W-2 Data Migration Gap: If there is any doubt about W-2 accuracy in January, it means the Historical Data Migration was never verified. An IT professional would look for a “Sign-Off Sheet” proving that every cent of 2025’s data was correctly mapped into ADP. The current panic is a massive “red flag” that the Auditor’s office moved the data and simply hoped for the best.
- Failure of Internal Controls (UAT): IT experts look for User Acceptance Testing (UAT) logs. These are records showing that department heads actually tested specific scenarios—like police certification pay or fire department overtime—in a “sandbox” (test) environment. The fact that these specific pay types are failing across the city proves there is no log of this testing ever happening.
- Premature Elimination of the Payroll Clerk: From a risk-management perspective, getting rid of the payroll clerk before the new system was “stabilized” or not hiring a new payroll clerk (usually a 90-day error-free window) is a massive failure. In IT, and finance we call this an “unmitigated risk.”
Where was the Oversight?
The most shocking revelation from last night’s meeting? The vendor (ADP) reportedly had no idea there were even any issues. In a professional IT environment, there is a “Hyper-care” period where the vendor and internal IT staff are in constant communication to squash bugs. If the vendor was in the dark, it means the City Auditor’s office wasn’t even reporting the failures as they happened. Furthermore, the city’s own IT staff—who should have been the “gatekeepers” of this transition—appear to have been completely missing from the testing phase.
The Verdict: This issue mirrors other software and IT failures we have seen in Marion City government. It wasn’t a “glitch”—it was a failure of oversight. You don’t have these kinds of problems if you follow basic IT, accounting, and audit standards. The City Auditor took shortcuts, ignored the experts, and now our city workers are the ones paying the price.
Marion Watch will be sending an email to to city today requesting all testing logs. Updates to follow.