Yellowknife (Feb 14/05) - A computer glitch forced the territorial government to guess at dollar figures on more than 4,000 paycheques issued Friday.

Finance Minister Floyd Roland said the government became aware of the problem about a week ago. A week's worth of payroll information, from Feb. 1 to 8, went missing from the government's payroll program, PeopleSoft, after the system crashed and had to be rebooted.

The crash forced payroll staff to scramble to have paycheques ready for Friday. Roland said they decided the best way to expedite the crisis was to base the dollar amounts on the latest paycheques to what employees received during the last pay period two weeks ago.

He said his department will now have to figure out which employees were overpaid and who was short-changed.

"It's now after that: how do we make adjustments?" said Roland.

"What was on the books two weeks ago is not necessarily on the books this payday."

Roland said he isn't sure what caused the program to crash, whether it was an outside virus or an internal problem. He said his department is investigating.

Roland said the problem was widespread enough to affect pay documentation for most of the government's 4,000-plus employees, including his own paycheque and those of other MLAs. The problem wasn't limited to the government's payroll software. Links to the government's Web site went inactive for several days last week.

Hay River South MLA Jane Groenewegen, who was taking in Roland's budget address on Thursday, jokingly wondered whether she was still getting paid the next day.

"All I know is that the money magically appears every two weeks in my account," she said.