This seems like the most obvious fix. Create the Payroll Job in the "WAITING FOR APPROVAL" state instead of the "APPROVED" state.

Perhaps the OG JCL cutely encoded the job state into a single bit and no one has dared touch it since the Ford Administration.

Begs a loosely related question: what VCS do you suspect the JCL is stored in? I'm going with the "incremental .BAK system", if any.