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06/21/2017 04:00 AMWhen Tenzin Rabjam, an Old Saybrook High School senior, became an intern in the First Selectman’s office last fall, he hoped the experience would teach him more about politics. What he actually learned was so much more.
“When I first came in [as an intern], it was with an interest in politics. I didn’t know the process. [While] this internship was focused more on finance and accounting, what I learned was that it plays into politics greatly. I didn’t know how many steps there were and how many boards it went through before you get a budget. I didn’t know how sophisticated the process was,” says Tenzin.
What are his future plans? They’re driven in part by his Tibetan heritage and what it means to him.
“From when I was a kid, my parents told me the history of Tibet and how China took it over in 1959. Every March 10 we have our National Uprising Day when we go into New York City and protest peacefully.”
In the fall, Tenzin will enter American University in Washington, D.C., with a plan to pursue a major in politics. “I want to become a United Nations foreign affairs officer and I want to help the people in Tibet.”
His internship’s timing coincided with a key but temporary town need—extra help to research, document, and organize into spreadsheets town records and financial data in advance of the town’s July 1 accounting system conversion date. The workload for this conversion was larger than usual because not only was the town moving to a new software package, the town also was re-organizing the method for recording and reporting town revenues, expenses, and reserves. The new approach was based on the state-mandated system for municipalities called the Uniform Chart of Accounts (UCOA).
“A lot of work is done up front with a conversion like this, to UCOA,” says Town Finance Director Lee Ann Palladino.
In September 2017, Tenzin arrived as an intern in the First Selectman’s office just as Palladino and the Finance Department were starting the conversion preparation process. So intern Tenzin, for four hours a week, worked under Palladino’s direction to collect financial data and information from department heads and then load the budgetary numbers into spreadsheets designed to match the new UCOA format.
At the same time, town records previously kept in paper form also had to be loaded into UCOA-consistent spreadsheets before they could be uploaded into the new accounting system. File cabinets had to be searched to find original records and then the data entered—and all of this extra work had get done without derailing the normal business of the town. Not an easy task.
After working under Palladino’s direction for two months, Tenzin’s hard and careful work distinguished him. Palladino and First Selectman Carl Fortuna, Jr., then asked Tenzin if he would work 20 hours a week and get paid to help the town assemble and enter into spreadsheets the information needed to prepare for the conversion project. He agreed and that meant that each weekday from December through March, he split his time between his senior year classes at Old Saybrook High School school and his work at Town Hall.
At the June 5 Board of Selectmen’s meeting, First Selectman Carl Fortuna, Jr., praised Tenzin’s contribution both as intern and temporary town employee from December 2016 through March 2017.
“Having Tenzin all year has been an absolute tremendous benefit to our accounting system conversion, saving a lot of time,” says Fortuna.
Palladino later explained the many tasks that she and Tenzin worked on together.
“We started in mid-September with the Town Public Works Department Inventory,” says Palladino.
All capital assets of greater than $5,000 in value had to be found, identified specifically, and entered into a spreadsheet.
“He had to go through the files, match each vehicle and [vehicle identification number], and find and match it with the vehicle title,” says Palladino.
And this was the just the first step in creating the digital spreadsheet documenting the type, age, identifying number, value and location for each capital equipment item and vehicle in the Public Works Department.
Other tasks assigned were to enter into the digital spreadsheets all of the town’s vendors and contractors and information from paper-based financial records.
Tenzin would enter the data he collected into a spreadsheet design created by SunGard and Palladino. Palladino then reviewed and checked his work.
“We worked very closely together,” says Palladino. “His work saved us so much time and effort.”
During the late fall and early spring, town departments worked on preparing their budgets in the new UCOA format. Tenzin sat in on department budget meetings and Board of Selectmen and Finance meetings to learn about how the budgets were built and refined. Then in March, along with town staff, he attended SunGard system training sessions to help him with his work.
When the town voted to approve the budget in May, the budget format was already in the UCOA format. That meant that when the town officially made the conversion to the new system on July 1, the transition would be seamless.
With the budget approved, the town’s Finance Department was all ready to pull the system conversion switch on July 1, the start of the new fiscal year. What was still not ready to go live was the payroll software module. Palladino had planned originally to use the summer and fall of 2017 to collect and enter into spreadsheets the town employee demographic information needed to bring payroll in-house. Then the new in-house payroll function could begin on Jan. 1, 2018.
But with two interns available to help—Kiwon-Paul Dionne-Lee joined Tenzin for the spring term—she decided to try to have in-house payroll go live on July 1, 2017, on the same day as the system conversion.
So Tenzin and Dionne-Lee, working under Palladino’s director, went from town department to town department collecting data on all town employees. Many of the demographic data were kept in paper records and had to be entered into spreadsheets that could later be uploaded to the town system. Information loaded into these spreadsheets would include details like employee name, years of service, department, benefits, and union-affiliation. With the two of them working together, this data was collected.
“Everything before was on paper so we had to type, transfer to spreadsheets, and proof the employee demographic information that drives payroll. We put it into an Excel spreadsheet first—SunGard gave us the spreadsheet. We had to work to a deadline,” says Tenzin. “This was the first time that my work—and whether it’s done on time—really mattered,” says Tenzin. “I enjoyed the entire environment here” in the Selectman’s Office.
Now, according to Palladino, thanks to Tenzin and Dionne-Lee’s work collecting the employee demographic information, the town will begin start doing in-house payroll six months earlier than originally planned.
“One thing I can really say about this internship is that it really made me grow as an individual. It helped me gain confidence in myself. I was never really sociable before this, but now I know a lot department heads because I was in meetings with them. This [experience] helped me learn how to build relationships,” says Tenzin.