Harvard’s switch to a new payroll system late last month has left many students employed by the University without their paychecks.

According to several student employees and Director of the Student Employment Office Martha H. Homer, an undetermined number of student employees have not received pay this fall.

But Marilyn D. Touborg, director of communications for Harvard’s office of human resources, said the department was unaware of any major payroll problems.

“PeopleSoft—our new payroll system—seems to be working quite well,” Touborg said. “This [problem]is certainly upsetting to the people it is affecting, but if you look also at the enormity of this project, by and large it has gone very well.”

But Russell P. Leino ’05, who works at the bells’ desk in Currier House and in Hilles Library, said the University has not paid him for the nearly 50 hours he has worked since the beginning of the school year.

“Right now I’m scraping the bottom,” Leino said. “I haven’t bought any of my books yet. It’s a bad situation for me.”

Leino said his boss told him yesterday that he would probably be paid by Oct. 25.

Leino said he has heard that a “backup entering people into the new payroll system” caused the paycheck delay and that less than 10 of his 30 student co-workers at Currier have received paychecks this school year.

J. Alan Dodd ’05, a research assistant for the economics department, said the new system has left him unpaid for 32 hours of work since the beginning of the fall.

Dodd said his boss told him the software upgrade caused the delay and that he should receive his paycheck—usually distributed weekly—on Oct. 28.

Harvard’s Human Resources Project, designed to develop improved computer systems for human resources, payroll, benefits and time collection, switched to PeopleSoft in late September in order to upgrade the system.

“In our case we had to have a new system primarily because the old one was about to fall apart. It wasn’t even one system, and we had to make the different systems work together, but they didn’t,” Touborg said.

According to Touborg, any problems in the new system are caused by people “having difficulty getting up to speed” with the operations of PeopleSoft.

For example, Touborg said, it’s possible that payroll information of new employees was not entered soon enough into the new system or that employees and employers have not yet adapted to the new electronic time sheet system.

Gregory J. Wrenn ’02-’03, who works in the Writing Center, said he has found it impossible to use the new system—and, as a result, he said he has not been paid for his work this year.