State Controller John Chiang says configuring the state's antiquated computer system to pay workers minimum wage would take six months.

Could it possibly take so long? Some computer experts are skeptical.

"It sounds fishy because I bet if the governor wanted to increase everyone's salaries 10 percent, I can't see the controller saying he can't do it," said Robert Dewar, president and chief executive officer of AdaCore, a computer software company based in New York and Paris.

The state payroll system is based on COBOL – short for Common Business Oriented Language – a code first introduced in 1959 and popularized in the 1960s and 1970s.

The language is still very much alive, playing a role in moving 80 percent of the world's financial transactions, according to Kevin Moultrup, president of North America Operations for Micro Focus.

But aides to Chiang say the problem isn't just the language itself.

They say another factor is the age of the system, which was designed more than two decades ago.

Since then, hundreds of layers of complexities have been added to comply with changing state and federal laws, pay scales, and state administrative rules.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has pushed to cut state worker pay to the federal minimum wage level immediately to help the state through its cash crunch.

Complying with Schwarzenegger's order isn't as simple as entering a different salary for all 245,000 employees into the system, controller's spokesman Jacob Roper said.

After that step, each employee's file is processed through hundreds of checks. The system makes sure the employee isn't being overpaid or underpaid, which deductions apply, which state and federal codes govern the person's employment and which federal taxes must be withheld.

"By entering an entirely new payment rate in an isolated fashion, it interferes with hundreds of other automated processes downstream in the payroll system," Roper said.

For an August 2007 pay increase that applied to 179,000 employees, he said the controller's office worked for months beforehand with state payroll specialists. But even that change, he said, involved 20,000 error messages that programmers had to work out manually.

Schwarzenegger's side acknowledges the pay system isn't perfect. His administration has argued that it needs an upgrade.

The state has undertaken a project to replace its payroll systems, which is expected to come online within the next two years.

But administration aides say it's possible to skirt the difficulty in the meantime.

"We know there are ways it can be treated like a payroll advance, which departments currently have the ability to do," said Lynelle Jolley, spokeswoman for the state Department of Personnel Administration.

Jolley said another option might be to temporarily switch employees to an alternate pay range, take a flat tax deduction for everyone, then adjust the amounts of those checks once normal pay resumes.

In an effort to force the change, Schwarzenegger's administration sued Chiang last week. A court date has yet to be set.

Once the new state payroll systems come on line in two years or so, they won't use COBOL, Roper said.

Critics of the language like Kathy Yelick, a University of California, Berkeley, computer science professor, talk about COBOL's lengthy lines of code and the difficulty in building upon other software.

Newer systems are well-supported and thus easier to use since programs don't have to be created from scratch, Yelick said.

Plus, true COBOL experts are aging and retiring from the work force.

For its COBOL programming, the state relies in part on retired state employees who have returned to work part time.

They were among thousands of workers laid off to help save money under Schwarzenegger's executive order.

Today's computer science students often aren't being trained in what is likened to Latin – a language hardly spoken today even though plenty of words are based upon it.

"I don't want to say I've never heard of it, it just doesn't ring a bell," said Phillip Altstatt, a junior at California State University, Sacramento, who has taken a number of computer science courses and builds Web sites as a part-time job. "If we talked about it, it was really briefly."

Call The Bee's Gina Kim, (916) 321-1228. Bee Political Editor Amy Chance contributed to this report.