Employee opinion at Penn State is divided over a new system that is supposed to keep better tabs on employees' travel expenses.

The university is implementing a more "streamlined" method for employee compensation called the Employee Reimbursement System (ERS) to improve upon an old system that made it difficult to see exactly how employees were spending university dollars.

ERS is a Web-based system developed by Concur Technologies that will be used to reimburse university employees for out-of-pocket expenses they incur during university-sponsored travel.

Under the school's old paper-based reimbursement system, the university could automatically see how much money was spent on travel, but only in broad categories, said Cathy Shannon, chairwoman for the committee that recommended adopting a new reimbursement system.

Beofre, the university could track how much money people were spending on certain things, but the amount spent on certain expenses, such as lodging or meals, was not automatically tallied.

The receipts were kept on file, Shannon said, but the data was not available "in any way that could be quickly summarized and reported. This new system will allow us to summarize and report travel expenses in a greater degree of detail."

ERS trainer Deneyse Serino said if violations of the system were a problem in previous years, they were not mentioned during the implementation of the new system.

According to the Penn State budget, Penn State spent $20.2 million in 2004-05 and $22.8 million in 2005-06 for travel expenses.

Shannon said there's no objective for how much money the new system is supposed to save, but the goal for the new system is greater efficiency and "anything that's more efficient saves money," she said.

Right now, the system is being used by members of the School of Information Sciences Technology, the Applied Research Lab and all science departments, except for physics, which opted out of the program, said Larry Bell, the financial officer of the Eberly College of Science.

There are plans to eventually extend the program throughout other parts of the university, but ERS project manager Cathy Helsel said that there is currently no timetable for the expanision.

"We're taking it one step at a time to make sure that it's rolling out well," she said.

Ayusman Sen, chemistry department head, said chemistry staff assistants often use ERS and they're happy with it.

"We've had problems, but they haven't been too serious," he said.

Head of the astronomy and astrophysics department Larry Ramsey said the new system, while well intended, was a step back.

Ramsey said the system was made for industry, not universities.

"It's cost us a huge amount of people time to do it," Ramsey said, estimating that the system increased his department's total workload by 10 to 15 percent.

"I've seen how much has not gotten done because we've had to take up this extra load."

Ramsey said that a clumsy Web interface is the reason the system is time-consuming, adding that when he complained to others about the system, he was ignored, and that staff members who complained about it were intimidated.

Jan Barnoff, director of systems analysis and programming for financial information systems, said this is not the case.

"There are some things that we can change per users request very easily, and there's other things, because it's a purchased product, that we can't change without a lot of expense and a lot of time," she said, adding that all inquiries submitted to ERS are discussed.

Biology department business manager Anna Lombard said she uses the system to approve the forms.

She said that when she made suggestions to her department's financial officer, the recommendations were addressed and upgrades were implemented.

Connie Horner, an accounting assistant in the same department as Lombard, said that she enters financial data into the system, and ERS saves "a lot of time and money and paper."