Other municipalities using the same salary system are causing havoc for the employees of the City of Helsinki | News
According to the CEO of the technology company, the main issue is adequate training.
In a few months, communities all over Finland will start working in welfare service municipalities, which will replace the country’s old social and health service system of hundreds of individual municipalities.
When it happens early next year, more than 200,000 people will effectively have new employers who will pay them for their work.
Almost half of Finland’s 21 new welfare service provinces plan to use the same salary payment system, which has continued to cause big problems in Helsinki since it was released in the spring.
Due to problems with the salary database system, many employees in the capital region have been left unpaid, underpaid, and there have even been cases where former employees have been paid for work they did not do.
The problems of the city of Helsinki, Finland’s largest employer, have continued until the summer.
Minister of Municipal Affairs, Sirpa Paatero (SDP) told Yle on Sunday that he wants to get a comprehensive explanation of Helsinki’s problems, so that similar things do not happen as the social and health reforms progress.
Experience with the system since 2021
The regions that use – or will implement – the system that has caused so many headaches for city workers in the capital region are Länsi-Uusimaa, Vantaa and Kerava.
Kimmo SarekoskiThe personnel training director of the welfare services of Western Uusimaa, said that he had followed Helsinki’s difficulties with some concern.
However, the region started using the system manufactured by the IT company Sarastia at the beginning of 2021. But unlike Helsinki, which uses the system exclusively, Espoo uses it only partially and handles the rest of the work internally.
“Espoo has been using the system since last year, and 60 percent of our payments have been made with that system,” he explained.
“Because of this, we’re likely to see fewer errors,” Sarekoski said.
CEO: Proper training, information transfer is important
Mika KantolaThe CEO of Sarastia, which is behind the salary database system, said that he knows people from Helsinki who have dealt with salary problems in recent months, but there is nothing wrong with the technology itself.
“The system pays wages based on the information entered into it,” he said.
Kantola stated that massively building new functions from scratch is not easy, so it is very important to train personnel and get used to new routines.
He added that he has no worries that a large workload would burden the system when the welfare municipalities take the system seriously.
Another thing is that the regional services get the new system up and running with the correct migration of the old databases.
“Of course, together with our customers, we will correct all possible errors as quickly as possible,” said Kantola.
A big change
Meanwhile, Anne SivulaThe personnel training manager of Vantaa and Kerava County said that he is worried about Helsinki’s problems.
However, moving to Vantaa and the Kerava welfare province is easier, because the city of Kerava already uses Sarastia for its salary needs.
“Salary workers don’t have to learn a new system,” he explained.
Nevertheless, Sivula admitted that establishing a welfare county still requires a lot of effort, because even though Kerava uses Sarastia to receive salaries, Vantaa’s social and health services currently share another system with the Helsinki and Uusimaa Hospital District (HUS).
However, he said that the dialogue with the Sarastia company has continued.
“This is inevitably a big change. Everything will probably not go perfectly at the beginning of the year, but work is being done to make the transition as smooth as possible for the employees,” said Sivula.