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CBS News
5 hours ago
- Business
- CBS News
Overtime payments continue to skyrocket among Pittsburgh departments, including fire bureau
The city of Pittsburgh's payroll is awash in overtime. Last week, Pittsburgh City Controller Rachael Heisler reported the city has already spent 77% of the money budgeted for overtime this year and projects it will go $20 million over budget. Of all city departments, the largest amount of overtime has long been in the Pittsburgh Bureau of Fire, but as KDKA Lead Investigator Andy Sheehan reports, efforts to rein in that overtime have fallen short and may have even backfired. For years and years, everyone in the fire bureau, except for the chief and two assistants, has been a member of the union. It is a structure that has long rankled administrations, which complain they can't effectively manage the bureau. "You can't have a functional bureau with a chief and two assistant chiefs as the only non-union members of the entire fire bureau," Deputy Mayor Jake Pawlak said. "You can't run any institution that way." The next rank is deputy chief. The city has long had four. Each is a member of the union, and each is eligible for overtime. But while the city has been keen on reining in fire overtime, those deputies have not exactly been management watchdogs. Instead, they've consistently been among the city's top earners, each making an average of $310,000 a year — nearly tripling their base pay. So, in the last contract negotiations, the city removed the deputy chiefs from the union, making them ineligible for overtime. But all four then took demotions to the rank of battalion chief so they could still get it. Meanwhile, fire overtime continues to spin out of control. The city has spent 70 percent of the $16.5 million budgeted for fire overtime and will almost certainly go over budget again this year. "This move that you were trying to rein in overtime has actually exacerbated the problem?" KDKA's Andy Sheehan asked. "We expected that that's the course they were going to take when we bargained that," Pawlak said. "It's a long-term investment in the ability of the fire bureau to be responsibly managed." Pawlak says the city anticipated the move. The contract gave the deputies another year of overtime eligibility before each took the demotion. Three of them retired this spring, and their pension is based on their three highest years of earnings. Only one remains in the rank of battalion chief, and the positions of deputy chief are vacant. Pawlak said overtime is a stodgy problem, and the city is looking long term, eventually filling the deputy chief positions without having to pay overtime — another example of how reining in overtime is an uphill fight.
WIRED
11 hours ago
- Business
- WIRED
How Edward ‘Big Balls' Coristine and DOGE Got Access to a Federal Payroll System That Serves the FBI
Jul 30, 2025 11:58 AM Hundreds of pages of records reviewed by WIRED show just how quickly DOGE gained access to systems at the Small Business Administration—and through it, a USDA system that handles payroll for federal law enforcement. Photograph:In early February, Edward 'Big Balls' Coristine was one of two operatives for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) granted potentially wide-ranging access to a number of systems at the Small Business Administration (SBA). Through that foray, DOGE gained access to the National Finance Center (NFC), a sensitive system that provides human resources and payroll functions for the Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), among other agencies. This access has not been previously reported. And new reporting from WIRED, including the review of hundreds of pages of documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, offers insight into the comprehensive access DOGE operatives were able to gain to federal systems in the early days of the second Trump administration—and just how quickly they got it. Coristine is a 19-year-old who was one of DOGE's earliest hires and was brought on as a permanent government employee at the General Services Administration (GSA) before resigning and then resurfacing as a special government employee at the Social Security Administration. He and Donald Park, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu enthusiast and private equity investor, have previously been identified as DOGE operatives at the SBA who sought access to HR, contracting, and payment systems and information. Neither replied to requests for comment. Records reviewed by WIRED show that within five hours of a request from the office of the SBA's chief information officer that they be given access to SBA systems, Park and Coristine—who went by the online name 'Big Balls' and had reportedly been fired from an internship at a network monitoring firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers, after being suspected of leaking internal information—were granted entrance to the agency's core financial and loan systems. Not long after that, Coristine had access to NFC systems not even housed within the SBA, the agency to which he had been detailed. The mechanical process of granting access appears to have started just past noon on February 3, when Stephen Kucharski, the director of the SBA's Office of Performance Systems Management, an office in the SBA's Office of Capital Access, emailed 19 colleagues with an urgent request. Two DOGE affiliates, he said, were to be given the digital keys to the agency immediately. Under the subject line 'system access for Edward Coristine,' Kucharski wrote, 'Please help me and my OCIO colleagues as we mobilize to provide Edward Coristine and Donald Park Admin access to all SBA systems. This action has been cleared and we are on a very short time frame. Doug will be arranging a call to answer questions and I will add Edward to this distribution list as soon as we create his SBA account. His account should be completed very shortly.' The two biggest priorities, he added, were the SBA's human resources system and its contract system, to include 'detailed data on all active procurements.' Four minutes after sending his initial request, Kucharski followed up to add the SBA's chief information security officer. At 12:33 pm, Elias Hernandez, the associate administrator for the Office of Veterans Business Development, followed up with a message titled, "URGENT REQUEST FROM SBA!" to a smaller group addressed to Michael Jackson, the director of the NFC. (Kucharski, Hernandez, and Jackson did not reply to requests for comment.) 'Please help me get this request to the right NFC leaders who can make this happen ASAP,' Hernandez wrote. 'We need the NFC to grant Admin access to the reporting center, insights, and the NFC Mainframe for all SBA Personnel Office Identifiers (POIs) to the following SBA DOGE employees.' The NFC is an agency nested inside the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) that handles payroll for 650,000 government employees—over a fifth of the federal workforce—across more than 170 agencies, including the SBA, according to a source familiar with it who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the press. The information contained in the NFC's systems includes the Social Security numbers, banking information, addresses, and dates of birth for federal employees, including members of the FBI and DOJ. 'We can and have managed the complexities of law enforcement pay for decades,' says the source. (The USDA referred a request for comment from WIRED to the SBA. The SBA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) According to the source familiar with the NFC, requests for access, especially for sensitive systems, normally go through a vetting process. The request is evaluated and, if granted, only permits the lowest level of access required. 'We were being told,' they believed, 'to give them unlimited access.' According to emails viewed by WIRED, an IT manager at the NFC requested that Coristine and Park be granted 'admin authority' to the mainframe and access to two other applications: Insight, which includes detailed employment records, and the Reporting Center, which includes payroll data. The requests for Insight and the Reporting Center were for 'read only' access, meaning that Coristine and Park could see data in the system, but not change it. Within roughly three hours of Kucharski's email, the DOGE operatives had mainframe access, giving them—according to the source—the power to see sensitive information like an employee's 'salary, banking, address, deductions, debt and other vital employment information' at the NFC. In an email timestamped 4:15 pm, less than an hour after this access was granted, Coristine wrote to Hernandez and the SBA's deputy chief human capital officer, with another request: 'Could you please send me the NFC CIO's phone number?' All of this was quite unusual by normal government standards, though not those prevailing at the time: As Coristine and Park were gaining access to the NFC mainframe, another DOGE operative, Marko Elez, had gained read-write access to the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Treasury's Bureau of the Fiscal Service. The speed at which DOGE operatives were able to access these datasets, says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, was highly concerning, because it indicates they likely did not go through the regular screening and security clearance processes required of government employees who handle sensitive information. 'As far as we know, these people don't have real security background checks,' he says. Experts WIRED previously spoke to doubted that Coristine could have obtained a clearance. SBA spokesperson Caitlin O'Dea says, 'As federal employees, all personnel are subject to a rigorous clearance protocol prior to interacting with agency data. SBA is grateful to those who have helped uncover millions in fraud, waste, and abuse on behalf of American taxpayers and small businesses.' 'Oversight Democrats demand to know if this kid—and any of the DOGE employees shuffling through Americans' sensitive data—have passed the required background checks and clearances. DOGE continues to put the whims of the White House over the safety, security, and well-being of the American people and our nation,' Stephen Lynch, member of the House Oversight Committee, tells WIRED in a statement. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Shortly after Kucharski's initial request, Park sent an email to Coristine with the subject line, 'List of systems.' Coristine then forwarded this request to Kucharski. An hour after that, Coristine emailed another SBA employee with the subject line, 'RE: Access to Oracle & SQL Server Databases.' This appears to have put Coristine in position to potentially access significant amounts of sensitive personal information. The SBA supports small businesses and entrepreneurs by helping them access loans, government contracts, and business counseling and educational resources. As part of its routine processes, according to a current SBA employee who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak to the press, 'we collect a lot of data, like employer identification numbers (EINs), North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) numbers, and Social Security numbers.' Coristine would likely have had access to this sort of information because he was, according to emails obtained by WIRED, granted access to records and systems including the Capital Access Financial System (CAFS), the SBA's main portal for submitting and servicing loans His access further encompassed several CAFS subsystems that can contain granular information on loans and loan applications. 'Each one on its own doesn't have boatloads of information, but added together, the CAFS system as a whole, if you flip between the tabs, has all of the information from loan applications, street addresses, tax IDs, additional notes from SBA investigations and holds, etc.,' says a second SBA source familiar with some of the systems Coristine and Park had sought to gain access to, also on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press. Additionally, the source says, CAFS does have fields for citizenship status and for an alien registration number for noncitizens, as well as, the street address of the business, race, gender of the person listed as principal. Though agencies will sometimes loan staffers to each other for specific projects or to share particular expertise, Moynihan says that a single person or group of people 'operating in multiple agencies, accessing multiple data sets at the same time is really unusual.' 'I can't think of another example like this,' he says. While the emails reveal little about the purpose of DOGE's access to these systems at SBA and NFC, Moynihan says, 'the sensitivity of the data leads us to worry about the worst case scenario.' In April, WIRED reported that DOGE was marrying datasets across several agencies to support the Trump administration's immigration agenda, and to particularly target immigrants for removal or other forms of law enforcement. 'We're left speculating what the intention was here, given the information vacuum created by DOGE,' says Moynihan.
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
ADP forecasts annual 2026 revenue growth below estimates
(Reuters) -Automatic Data Processing forecast full-year 2026 revenue growth slightly below analyst estimates on Wednesday, as demand for its payroll and human capital management services softened amid ongoing economic uncertainty. Businesses have tightened spending in response to elevated interest rates and a volatile macroeconomic environment, weighing on demand for companies such as ADP. The conservative forecast comes as the industry undergoes consolidation and enterprises seek to deploy cash reserves to expand operations. In a bid to strengthen its market position, ADP acquired management services provider WorkForce Software last year. For the full year 2026, the company expects revenue growth between 5% and 6%, the midpoint of which is below analysts' growth expectations of 5.7%, according to data compiled by LSEG. The company expects revenue from PEO services to grow in the 5% to 7% range, while analysts expect it to grow about 5.7%. For the fourth quarter, the company reported revenue of $5.12 billion, compared with analysts' estimate of $5.04 billion. Revenue for its PEO segment grew 7% to $1.66 billion. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Globe and Mail
16 hours ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
New Thryv Workforce Center Manages Payroll for Small Businesses
Managing in-house payroll processing and tax compliance can be a time-consuming challenge for small businesses. According to the National Small Business Association's 2025 survey, 50 percent of small businesses spend more than three hours per month administering payroll taxes. To mitigate concerns around time and accuracy, Thryv® (NASDAQ: THRY), the leading small business marketing and sales platform, has launched Thryv Workforce Center ™, a payroll solution designed for growing businesses. Powered by Gusto ™, the leading people management platform for small businesses, Thryv Workforce Center saves SMBs valuable time by managing payroll and automated tax calculations directly within their existing Thryv account. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: This full-service solution does more than just calculate pay. It simplifies the entire payroll process, combining essential tools into one platform that manages a business' HR, taxes, and staff payments. It can also perform tasks like direct deposit and the creation of tax forms. 'Thryv is a trusted partner to over 100,000 small businesses and when we got growing requests to add payroll functionality to our platform, we listened,' said Rees Johnson, Thryv's Chief Product Officer. 'Most small businesses have to add separate payroll software, but now Thryv clients have the unique advantage of managing payroll within the same platform that they use daily for their business and marketing operations.' Noted Clayton Stokum, CEO of Alpha Behavior Strategies, 'Thryv has really helped me stay on top of the money coming in and made it easier to pay my employees as we continue to grow. It's given me clarity on where my money is going and that's been a game-changer.' Core Benefits of Thryv Workforce Center Centralized employee data: ensures all employee data and payroll information is stored in one secure, accessible location, reducing the risk of errors and saving time on administrative tasks. Payroll and automated tax filings: full-service payroll for W-2s and 1099s. Businesses can easily pay employees and contractors with automatic local, state and federal tax filings, helping to ensure tax compliance. Multiple payment options: employers can opt for either check or a two-day direct deposit via Plaid, Inc. Accessibility: employees can update direct deposit information and access pay stubs and tax forms at any time through the employee portal. Simple and transparent pricing: employers only pay active W-2 employees monthly, and contractors, only in the months they are paid. Unlimited payroll runs and filings are included. Flexibility: can be used by businesses looking to hire their first employee or those looking to switch from another system. 'We know small business owners everywhere want to save time and reduce errors with all-in-one solutions. With the launch of Thryv's Workforce Center, more small businesses in home services, healthcare, legal, and more now have a new option to manage their team and their business in one place," said Yi Liu, the General Manager of Gusto Embedded. "We're thrilled they partnered with Gusto Embedded to build a payroll product specifically designed for their customers within Thryv's platform.' ABOUT THRYV Thryv Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:THRY) is the provider of the leading sales and marketing platform designed to help small businesses attract new and repeat customers. Thryv software offers SMBs everything they need to manage day-to-day operations and grow efficiently. The platform's AI-supported marketing and business automations help business owners save time, compete, and win. More than 100K businesses globally use Thryv software to connect with customers and run and grow their business. For more information, visit
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Montgomery County teachers file class action grievance over payroll issues
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. () — Frustration is growing among some educators in the Montgomery County Public Schools system (MCPS) after some did not receive their paychecks on time, and others received less than they were owed. Now, the Montgomery County Educators' Association (MCEA) has filed a class action grievance against the school system, hoping to bring attention and swift action to what they say is an ongoing problem tied to a new payroll system. 'It is really outrageous,' David Stein, president of MCEA, said. Montgomery County Public Schools pickleball student-athletes headed to China He said the issue is not isolated and that several dozen members have reported problems. 'We need to make sure that our members are paid. They have bills themselves that need to be taken care of and families to support,' Stein said. 'It can really be a hardship when people are counting on a paycheck coming at a particular point and then it's not there.' Stein said the problems began after MCPS rolled out a new payroll system. Since then, teachers and staff have reported various issues to the school district. 'We have hundreds of members who have had issues with the payroll procedures,' Stein said. 'Not just not being paid, but there are issues with leave balances and incorrect pay amounts and some other issues that need to be resolved.' By filing a class action grievance, Stein said the union is using its bargaining power to push the district to act. 'We're basically forcing them to deal with the situation and resolve these issues that hundreds of our members are having,' Stein said. In response, MCPS said the issue affected summer employees who either started work after July 11 or submitted their timecards after that date. The district says all impacted employees will be paid by Wednesday. In a statement, the district said: 'MCPS sincerely regrets any financial and personal strain this delay may have caused. MCPS is committed to working with our associations to ensure our team members are confident they will be compensated correctly and in a timely manner going forward.' Montgomery County Public Schools Montgomery County parents react to court ruling on LGBTQ-related instruction in schools But Stein said the delay never should have happened in the first place. 'They've known these problems were there, and they need to make sure that they solve the issues,' he said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
