CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) -- Some graduate student workers at the University of Virginia say they can't count on the university to pay them on time.

The university created a task force in response to dozens of grad workers not getting paid in December.

The task force released its first update Friday and graduate student workers weren’t happy with what they read.

Administrators and graduate workers agree that the process of paying graduate workers has an infrastructure problem.

"Graduate workers are paid through we often feel unnecessary complicated ways," Ph.D. candidate Crystal Luo said.

"The processes are quite complex," said Associate Vice Provost and task force member Phil Trella.

But they're disagreeing on how to solve it.

Luo said there's a staffing problem because "the people who are actually responsible for doing this work are not adequately staffed, not adequately supported by the university."

"I don't think we have a major staffing challenge," said Trella. "I think we have a systems-and-processes challenge that emanates from the fact that there's such a diversity of sources and such a diversity of departments that are providing this funding."

For example, monthly stipends come from grants and have to be treated like fellowship or scholarship money, and bi-weekly wages for jobs like teaching have to go through the payroll system.

Trella said it would be helpful to have an automated system that could connect the different ways students get paid.

"Then that system pushes that information out to other systems, like our student information system or our payroll system, that then would deliver stipend and wages to students," he said.

Grad students say they want to know what's going on with the task force.

PhD student Olivia Paschal said not all departments got the latest update from the task force because there's only one student representative on it, and they had to try to distribute the information to 45 departments.

"Communication with all the graduate students from the task force itself, not shuffled down through these like various networks," she said.

Trella said they are open to working with the students to figure it out. He said they aren't trying to be difficult.

"That is deeply regretful that students would feel undervalued or underappreciated by the university," he said.