Payroll Office to phase out paper checks

Penn’s Office of the Comptroller — which prints on average 77,200 checks a year — will be soon eliminating paper checks.

The Payroll Office announced last month that starting in April they will only pay employees, including students and staff, through direct deposit or a new Automated Data Processing TotalPay system. This change is part of the Office of the Comptroller’s efforts to be more environmentally sustainable.

Students who have received a paper check in the past six months have until April 14 to opt-in for direct deposit. Those who do not will be automatically be enrolled in the ADP TotalPay Card system.

Those students will receive a TotalPay Card kit around the third week in April, which will include activation instructions, contact information, a Visa branded debit card and checks which can be written for up to the value of the card, senior director of Student Financial Services Michael Merritt wrote in an e-mail.

Financial Services Michael Merritt wrote in an email.

“Once implemented, any student wages, refunds and other reimbursements will be delivered via the TotalPay Card system,” he wrote.

The new system will cut the amount of paper that the University uses and reduce its carbon footprint, Merritt said.

Director of Payroll and Individual Disbursement Services Terri Pineiro added that the new system will create bank accounts for students and employees on the Penn payroll who were previously without one because of their bad credit ratings or lack of a Social Security Number.

Pineiro said that the new system will especially benefit shift workers and those who work weekends, since weekly walks to the Franklin Building to pick up paper checks can be a hassle.

Penn examined similar systems already in place at other higher education institutions including Temple University, Emory University and the University of California at Berkeley, Pineiro said. She also noted that large employers such as WalMart and Abercrombie & Fitch do not print checks for their employees.

Pineiro expects the transition to go smoothly because those companies “had no problem implementing it.”

For students who have never had bank accounts, it might take a little bit of learning to get used to it,” she added.

College sophomore Christina Lam, who works as an Information Technology Assistant in Rodin College House, said she enrolled in direct deposit as soon as she was hired because she “didn’t have time to [pick up her] checks each week.”

College freshman AJ Rossi, however, says he finds receiving paper checks for his job at the Social Planning and Events Committee Sound. “pretty easy”.

According to Merritt, 90 percent of work-study students on the Penn Payroll already receive their wages via direct deposit.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Earth and Environmental Science Department Chair Fred Scatena wrote in an email. “It makes sense and is in the direction that many institutions are going.”

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