By August of 2015, employees at MSU will no longer be receiving paper checks, according to MSU Vice President of Finance and Treasury Mark Haas, who gave a presentation to the Steering Committee on Tuesday.

When MSU was first looking to make this change, there were a couple of options they were looking into — the first of which requiring its employees to enroll in direct deposit.

“But the fact is, the laws in Michigan don’t allow that to happen,” Haas said at the meeting. “But what they did do, is about two years ago, they changed the law slightly to say if people do not choose to do direct deposit with their payroll, you could require them to use a payroll card.”

According to Haas’ presentation, of the University’s nearly 30,000 employees, roughly 150-200 salary employees and 2,000 hourly employees (many of these being students), still receive paper checks. These employees will now be given the option to either enroll in direct deposit or have their paycheck deposited onto an MSUFCU pay card, which will then work like any other debit card.

Over the course of the next several months, changes and adjustments will be put in place before the university makes the full transition in August 2015. At that point, any new hires of the university will only be given the choice to enroll in either direct deposit or the pay card.

There are a number of benefits to the university making this change, Haas said at the meeting. These include increasing security for its employees, increasing the convenience for its employees but also for the reduction of the cost of sending each check.

“It costs us about $5 per check, to generate these, to mail them out,” Haas said. “You figure if you’ve got 2,200 people, and you’re doing this a dozen times, it adds up to more than $100,000. That could basically fund another faculty position. That’s why we’re looking to do this.”