At the beginning of September, Appen launched its new contributor platform, CrowdGen. We understand that there have been challenges with the transition to the platform for some of our Contributors, specifically with regard to payment processing.
First, we apologize to our Contributors who have been impacted by this issue. We are truly sorry for the stress and frustration that this has caused. We are working diligently to fix the issue with the payment implementation, and I want to provide some additional context on how this occurred and what we are doing to fix the issue.
Why did Appen transition to a new Contributor platform?
The CrowdGen platform is custom-built to meet the requirements of our business and our crowd. For Contributors, CrowdGen provides a more streamlined and personalized experience to help them find and succeed in their work. This includes updates to enhance the experience for discovering projects, obtaining real-time support, and streamlining payments.
CrowdGen also enhances Appen’s ability to deliver high-quality data at scale with features that improve the efficiency of our delivery operations and the effectiveness of our targeting and segmentation for complex work.
What caused the payment issues?
In September, we migrated to our new platform, CrowdGen. During the recent transition to a new platform, we faced some unexpected issues with migrating data for payment processing. This resulted in delays for many Contributors, and our actions to fix the migration did produce some errors and inconsistencies in the amounts displayed to users through the new interface.
Ultimately the new system will offer a streamlined payment process and enhance transparency and choice for Contributors, but unfortunately, it has led to disruptions for this pay cycle. We have identified the issues and are working diligently to fix the issues with the payment implementation.
How is Appen addressing these payment issues?
Paying on time is a top priority for Appen and we are committed to resolving these as quickly as possible. In response to these challenges, we have been processing payments daily and will continue to do so until all discrepancies are resolved. Some Contributors received partial payments as we prioritized getting payments out, which caused some confusion for September. It’s worth noting that over two-thirds of payments were processed on time and the remaining payments will be processed by the end of this week. Payments for October will be on time per our usual payment schedule (paid in November).
We have maintained regular communication with our Contributors to let them know what we were doing to resolve this issue. We have a dispute system to solve payment discrepancies, and a dedicated channel will be opened shortly to allow users to directly report any outstanding payment issues from the hours worked in September. We will inform our Contributors about this new dedicated channel via CrowdGen Help Desk.
Looking ahead
I want to apologize again to our Contributor community. Trusting that you can work for a company that treats you fairly is a top priority for Appen. We pride ourselves on implementing fair business practices for our Contributors and will continue to put processes in place to ensure that our Contributors are prioritized. We have established programs like our code of ethics and fair pay to ensure our data is sourced and managed fairly.
Trusting a vendor to ethically source data for AI applications is critical, and we are committed to learning from this and improving our processes to ensure this does not happen again.
Do feel free to reach out to our team with any questions.