CAPPS Notes - July 20, 2005

I. Welcome (Cliff Lee) -

Cliff covered the procedures for evacuation in the event of an emergency evacuation and/or "Shelter-in-Place" crisis.

II. Disaster Recovery Drill (August 2005) (Lambert LeBleu) -

A formal invitation was emailed to CAPPS on or about 6/21/05 requesting agencies participate in the disaster recovery drill and today is the official (verbal) invitation. If you are interested, please email Lambert.LeBleu@usda.gov as soon as possible. We have had several communication issues (to include: dedicated T-1 lines, lease lines, VPN's). It's imperative that you be able to access NFC via the Philadelphia site and need all the provisions made to do this. Last week when Hurricane Dennis was looming, had it knocked out our communications, we would have recovered in Philly but some of you would have been scrambling trying to get connectivity which is crucial to complete your work. This is a good time to test out the communication links. If you have VPN's set up with NFC or if you're riding someone else's connectivity you should be OK; however, if you don't have a VPN, you need to be working w/NFC's Telcom Staff to set up and test VPN. In a test environment you cannot have 2 sites w/the same set of IP addresses; by default, you'll go to NFC production thinking you're connected to Philly and this can be dangerous. It's very important to work w/our Telcom folks and your Telcom folks to iron out these issues. If you are on a lease line, we will not be able to address these in time for the August drill. We are currently working to make the USDA Training Center available to connect to Philly and you'd be able to test some of your applications here at the USDA Training Center. Please realize that working from a remote site such as the USDA Training Center NEVER address your Telcom issues.

We're inviting agencies to participate in the drill; we'll have a scenario when it becomes unavailable at the end of PP 14, GESD will validate the 1st pass of payroll, some "dummy" T&A's will be entered and some add'tl files to run on the 2nd pass of payroll, then follow-up with PACS consolidation process to ensure it processed correctly. We attempted this test in March 2005; however, because of other testing criteria, we had to pull the plug 24 hours ahead of time and since enough testing had not occurred or was completed, we're going to redo that same test and it'll be based on PP 14 (not PP 3). You should be able to connect to the test site, do inquiries, updates, etc., but make sure you are in the Philly test site and not the mainframe/production server. If you go to the USDA Training Center, they will have PC's set up to help you out and point you in the right direction. They are not yet set up but plan to have it done for this drill. If you are connected to the test area at your own site, you'll have instructions for secure remote, etc., and can reconfigure PC to connect to NFC in Philly.

III. 2005 Pay Changes (Cliff Lee) -

A. Three R's - recruitment, relocation, and retention incentives; NFC programmers are still reviewing the required changes; following completion of their review, we'll let you know the target dates for implementation of the 3R's.

B. Special Rate changes - further changes coming on special rates; those who have read the new pay regulations know that we will no longer show the special rate under the scheduled salary but rather the special rate will be shown as a base rate from the General Schedule and a "Special Rate Supplement." The SF-50 will show the General Schedule base rate, the special rate supplement, and the Adjusted Salary will be the sum of the two. This will parallel the non-special rate employees with the General Schedule base rate, the locality pay adjustment, and the Adjusted Salary, the sum of the two. The NFC programmers are reviewing the changes and determining the needed programming changes. We are also awaiting confirmation that OPM is redefining the locality adjustment block to include both the locality adjustment and special rate adjustment.

C. Retained rate changes - Employee's on a retained rate or saved rate of pay are no longer entitled to locality pay effective May 1, 2005; after the system changes have been implemented, pay adjustment actions will need to be processed to convert the employee's adjusted pay (including locality pay) prior to May 1, 2005 to his/her new basic rate of pay (scheduled salary). OPM also eliminated the continued rates of pay (PRD M) and most saved rates of pay under PRD 4; pay adjustment actions placing these employees on pay retention will need to be processed after system changes have been completed; agencies will also need to review actions placing employees on pay retention or saved rates after May 1, 2005 to verify that their pay was set correctly; we will provide further information after system changes have been implemented.

D. LEO Base rates - Pay Table 0491 for LEO's at grades 3-10 -- since the inception of Pay Table 0491, OPM has shown them under PRD 6 as special rates; however, LEO base rates are not special rates as defined by 5 U.S.C. 5305; OPM wants to discontinue use of PRD 6 for Pay Table 0491 and make these employees PRD 0; in conjunction with this change, OPM proposes to change their pay plan to "GL"; to date,OPM has not finalized the change to the new Pay Plan "GL;" we will notify agencies of OPM's decision.

LEO employees at grades 3 - 10 who are receiving a special rate under 5 U.S.C. 5305 that is higher than the Pay Table 0491 rates would continue to be paid from the special rate table; however, the Pay Table 0491 rate would be shown as the scheduled salary; a special rate supplement would be shown, and the Adjusted Salary would be the sum of the two and would equal the special rate.

E. Phased Approach - because of the number and magnitude of the pay changes, NFC programmers may implement the changes in phases; after NFC has completed its review of the pay changes and their system impact, we will provide your more information regarding the implementation schedule.

F. 2006 Pay Raise - Congress and the White House are having their annual wrangling over the January Pay Raise with Congress wanting to give Federal employees a 3.1% raise and the Administration wanting to give a 2.3% raise. We will keep you apprised of the progress of the Pay Bill.

There is one significant proposed change for 2006 published in the Federal Register on 6/20/05; OPM is proposing to eliminate KC, St. Louis and Orlando locality pay areas, merging them into RUS in PP 01/2006; OPM is also proposing three new locality pay areas: Buffalo, Phoenix & Raleigh, NC, to be implemented in PP01/2006.

G. Jo has been doing some research on the number of GM employees in the agencies, the number of GM employee's on step, and the cost of placing GM employees on step. We will provide this information to agencies shortly. Based upon the information in this analysis, when agencies provide their comments to OPM on the new pay regulations, they may wish to include some recommendations to OPM concerning GM employees. For example, they may wish to consider converting GM employees at the top of the grade range to step the 10. (This would to approximately 2/3 of the GM employees on the NFC databases.) Another option agencies may wish to consider is recommending the converting of all GM employees to GS, given the relative minimum cost to place the remaining 1/3 of the GM employees to the next step. With the new pay regulations, pay setting for GM employees becomes even more cumbersome. In addition, we continue to encounter situations where agencies are erroneously placing employees in GM positions. Early analysis shows that it would be relatively inexpensive to get everyone on step - approximately $160K for the larger agencies. Another issue with merit pay is that agencies will now have to adjust their annual pay increase manually because we cannot compute the pay via the system due to the complexity. This is compounded by those in SSR that are to be converted to a standard salary rate. Again, this is just something to keep in mind. We realize that no one wants to spend money, but agencies are going to have to start factoring in how much it will cost to maintain these GM employees (i.e., annual increases manually, erroneous pay setting, etc.) Due to the complexity in the pay calculations for GM employees they are almost impossible to program and the cost to program for such a small (and dwindling) number of employees would be very high. Therefore, clients might want to incorporate recommendations regarding the GM's in their comments to OPM. Remember GM's are covered by these regulations and, if most of you want those with salaries equivalent to a step be converted to GS steps, maybe OPM will accept this.

H. Q&A's

1. Q: Do we comment to you (NFC) or OPM? A: Comment back to OPM. OPM is collecting many comments already because of the voluminous changes and we are suggesting that you add the GM comments as well. Talk to your staffing personnel to determine why they are continuing to enter employees into the GM pay plan. We may need to add an edit in PMSO to prevent this, but we understand that some PMSO issues may be valid. In most cases no new employees should be classified into the GM pay plan. Keep in mind it costs the agency money when errors are found and the employees are being paid higher than they should be. We still have some employees assigned to GM positions at the Step 1 level. This cannot legitimately occur. Employees who should have appropriately remained in the GM pay plan would be in the step 8, 9 or 10. FC: We have people under GM who have not changed yet, should we change them? A: Not as a general rule. However, if they are a GM earning an equivalent to the step 10 it might be worthwhile to make the change now and place them in the GS step 10. In the future, you are probably looking at manual pay adjustments for GM employees and this would reduce the number the agency would be required to process. Cliff indicated that when we had the two retro pay raises, we had several GM folks who were dropped out in the process. In addition, there were 13/10 equivalents whose pay was incorrectly set between the steps 9 and 10. If the 00 at the step 10 are actually placed on the step 10, it would be much easier on HR offices, especially if we have retroactive pay adjustment situations down the road.

2. Q: DOJ - If we have a GM employee and the pay is the same as the step 10, is this OK? A: Yes, their pay can equal the step 10 salary. We are suggesting that agencies may wish to recommend to OPM that they modify their GM regulations to require that GM employees at the maximum of the grade range be change to GS and placed in step 10.

3. Q: is it possible to make over step 10? A: the system should not allow a salary over the step 10 rate of the grade unless the employee is on pay retention. FC: If at the maximum salary, can they be paid more? A: the system should cap the salary at the step 10 unless the employee is placed on pay retention.

4. Q: TR - Regarding the new special rate supplement, is NFC targeting implementation for PP01? A: No specific timeframe as yet for implementation. NFC programmers are still reviewing the changes and the system impact. As you know, NFC does not like to implement changes in PP-01 because of the volume of pay adjustment actions generated in Pay Period 01. However, we will keep that option on the table.

5. Q: TR - remaining pieces of Federal Workforce Flexibility Act - 3R's and Pay retention - NFC sent email to CAPPS regarding employees not covered by Title 5. Is NFC making changes to GS and GM only and agencies have to alert you to include the others? A: Yes, the new pay regulations only apply to employees covered by Title 5. If you have similar Pay Plans that are not covered by Title5 and want to parallel the Title 5 changes, you need to let NFC know so that we can include these pay plans in the new programming. FQ: TR - OCC employees are not covered by Title 5 but have employees on pay retention. If we don't tell you anything, do they go along with the changes? A: If you don't tell us to include OCC in the pay retention changes, we will not include them in the programming changes. FC: Their retention allowances would be based on scheduled salary. Their retained pay would continue to include locality pay. FR: Without your agency approval, NFC cannot make the change. We are only doing changes for GS and GM at this time. Some of the Congressional agencies (eg., GAO) have traditionally followed Title 5 rules but are not required to follow Title 5. These agencies must let us know whether they wish to follow the new Title 5 regulations as well. NFC cannot force you to follow OPM pay guidance if your agency is not covered by Title 5.

6. Q: Deadline to let NFC know? A: The sooner the better. Programming has not yet started. Please let us know no later than the August 17th CAPPS meeting.

7. Q: TR - How do you plan to distinguish between people who receive retention allowances before May 13th and new cases? A: OPM has established a new NOAC 827 for retention incentives authorized under the new regulations. However, for recruitment incentives and relocation incentives there is an overlap of some of the authorities. As a result it is impossible to differentiate actions processed under the former regulations (grandfathered) and actions processed under the new regulations. Based upon the PPSPS survey of the two NOAC's, clients have indicated that they will have finished paying these under the old regulations by September 2005. At that point everything else should fall into new categories.

UPDATE: On June 8, 2005, OPM issued guidance for processing the 3R's under the new regulations prior to publication in the Guide to Processing Personnel Actions. We will send these instructions to CAPPS since it is apparent that some agencies have not yet received them.

I. Personnel actions documenting the 3R's under the new regulations may not be processed in the NFC system until programming changes have been implemented. Agencies will have to handle these payments via SPPS.

J. On July 8, 2005, OPM issued "Changes in Processing Personnel Actions Resulting from New GS Pay Administration Guidance" Cliff indicated that the changes OPM issued gave us some problems and we are awaiting clarification from OPM. For example, some authority codes had two different citations and three authority codes had the same citation. Overall, there were about twelve authority codes affected by the changes. OPM's expert will not be returning until next week. After we receive clarification from OPM, we will further review the OPM guidance to see which changes can be implemented immediately and which changes will have to be held until completion of the programming for the pay changes.

1. TR - reviewing reg's are you considering giving flexibility to each one of the incentives; eg., recruitment paid bi-weekly or sticking to format that existed before? A: We have to look at all options that the law has provided. We are not sure yet on how we will offer them. You may have to access SPPS to do some of these but the details have not yet been flushed out.

2. FERC - If we use SPPS to process under the new regulations for retention allowances, do these have to be processed manually every PP? A: If you do the recruitment and relocation bonus and retention as well these are offered right now under the old regulations as a lump sum at beginning. If you are offering biweekly under the new authority, yes, they must be entered every pay period until programming is done. FQ: There is no way in SPPS can we say process every PP? A: No. FQ: All of the retention allowances under the old regulations will be done by the end of September? A: JO - According to the feedback received on the PPSPS survey, allowances obligated under old regulations would all be processed by mid-September. FC: FERC has some under the old regulations that are effective until May 2006. FR: We are talking about the relocation and/or recruitment lump sum's. The old regulations are OK for retention allowances thru April 30, 2006. In addition, the retention incentives under the new regulations will be processed via a separate NOAC.

IV. 2005 Customer Forum Reminder (Penny Forbes) - reminded everyone about the 2-day Forum next week; Executive Session on Tuesday, 7/26 in the morning and the extended session on Tuesday, 7/26 in the afternoon. The agenda is on NFC's homepage. Q: did invites go out to the Executives? A: Yes, they were forwarded; the invitation was sent out about a month ago and a reminder went out a week ago.

V. Benefits Update (Jody Nyers)

A. TSP Changes - Open Season Ended 6/30/2005 and programming changes have been made and all non-open season actions will be effective with the processing of PP 14 (July 18, 2005). If you have any actions in suspense, let Jody know. TSP announced the "L" (Lifecycle) Funds will be available on August 1, 2005. More information is available via www.tsp.gov. TSP has also revised the TSP-1 and the new form is available on their website. Also, remember that the annual limit on elective deferrals for 2005 is $14,000 and if you have employees who will reach this amount before the end of the year they should take action to ensure they do not lose out on matching funds. Seems like every year some highly paid official reaches the limit around PP 23 and no deduction is made for a couple of PP's and no matching funds are received which makes for an angry employee. This can be avoided by taking action now.

B. Long Term Care Insurance ELS Insert - OPM and LTC Partners plan to include an "insert" into the PP 16 earnings and leave statements. The expense will be picked up by OPM. I forwarded this pdf file to you yesterday and OPM needs a reply back (only if you do NOT want it included) no later than July 25, 2005. Any questions about the insert should be referred to Terry Schliecher @ OPM on 202-606-0417.

C. Dental/Vision Portal via OPM. The dental/vison portal is still slated to be in place by next summer, July 2006 and more information will be forthcoming as carriers have to be selected, fees arranged, etc. FedWeek News sent out a notification email this week regarding Dental/ Vision benefits under Mail Handlers Health Plan. This is not a government-sponsored plan and has nothing to do with OPM's upcoming dental/vision portal. FedWeek is a private company.

VI. Employee Express Update / Employee Self Service (George Morris) - no report.

VII. User & Work Group Updates

A. Awards - (JO Bonner) - Next Quarterly meeting is August 10, 2005. The quarterly meeting will be held in Lincoln 1&2. There is not much happening in this area right now. The net payment for DHS is still on hold due to some additional programming changes that are still being determined.

B. Benefits - (Jody Nyers) - Next meeting is scheduled for August 25, 2005.

C. EPIC - (Gary Gaspard) - Next meeting is scheduled for July 21, 2005 at 10am (EST) and Lynda sent out an email about this being a conference call. 1-800-867-6144, 4475#, how many lines did you get? 20 at this time. If any technical problems, call the trouble number to 202-720-8560. Can add add'tl lines. Will resend the email today.

D. EPP - (Randy Speed) - one issue that's come up is 50's on EPP and we're getting together a list of questions to CAPPS to determine what your agencies want to see in the way of requirements, etc. Several issues have surfaced; one being the 50B cannot be an official record b/c OPM doesn't allow it; format of the 50B is different than the printed format; what should be there? Or not be there? We'll put together a list of questions and determine if we should pursue this. USDA says under e-OPF we should not consider it because each employee will have access to their own OPF. Since USDA is going forward with e-OPF, we'll need to work on getting that data sent to OPM to be included in the OPF. By 2007 everyone will have access to this. Q: Penny - What's the cost associated with this? A: MAJOR costs but no choice. Doesn't come without a cost but via OPM we have no choice but to take on that cost. USDA's vote is to have OPF data sent to the e-OPF file vs added to the EPP. NFC will continue to look into this and consider those alternatives.

E. FESI (Donna Speed) - no report.

F. PMSO - (George Morris) - no report.

G. T&A - (JO Bonner) - The T&A User and Requirements groups meet the 1st payday Thursday of each month. As a general update, NFC is going to release STAR 5.0 in January 2006. This version will allow employee entry via the EPP in PP-02. Several agencies have been anxiously awaiting this feature. The agency can control the employee entry option by T&A contact point. Randy indicated that NFC will provide a demo of the employee entry feature at the Customer Forum next week.

VIII. Potpourri

A. FCC - STAR traffic is slow, not good. In PP-13 it was still slow. R: Randy Speed knows there are have been a few issues that have been corrected. STAR is controlled via a load balancer on the front-end that splits the incoming traffic between two servers. One server had to be temporarily pulled out which caused a traffic jam. There was also a database issue in PP-13. It has been corrected so STAR should be fixed now and back to normal. Both servers are working. The database change has been corrected. If you continue to have problems, call Randy. We also recognize that there were big problems on July 19, 2005 but not just for STAR but for all systems. This was due to a mainframe issue and was resolved within 30 minutes. Another specific issue for STAR was that engineering had to bounce the connection to the db2 database yesterday around noon. Again, this issue was resolved quickly.

B. TR - New version is the client server version? A: No, there will be no more updates to client version. The new version is to the web version of STAR only. Client server versions were scheduled to be sunset in September. Randy Gonzales added that this has been extended to six months after 5.0 is implemented for STAR client and PC-TARE.

C. DOJ - We have student load repayments that we entered into EPIC. A couple agencies said that the amount is not being reflected on the SF-50. Is this tied to a remark? A: We'll have to look into this and determine what the process is.

D. DOJ - We are doing some testing the emergency military patrol leave. Is there a bulletin coming out on this? A: JO - The bulletin for 22-days off-set military leave was issued last week, maybe. It is on the NFC website under Pubs & Forms.

POST MEETING UPDATE: The bulletin (05-12) was actually issued on July 7th.

E. DOL - At the last meeting we distributed a copy of proposed changes to the E&L based upon their union's recommendation. Are there any comments or questions? FD: Agencies had not reviewed the package and/or reviewed it with appropriate agency staff. Therefore, they were not prepared to discuss it at the meeting. JO will e-mail a soft copy of the package to the CAPPS reps after today's meeting. Clients need to review the package prior to the next meeting (August 17th) and be prepared to discuss pros/cons. After a final recommendation is decided in the August CAPPS, agencies must notify PPSPS in writing by September 20th 2005 with a go/no-go decision on the recommendation. If you have any questions on the proposal, please contact Yvonne Simms on 202-693-6933.

1. Will they entertain minor changes? DOL - Yes.

2. Has DOL checked with OPM to see how their proposal fits in with OPM's standardization initiative for the E&L? DOL - No. We can do that.

F. DOL - The Claimant Query System (CQS) deals with worker's compensation through OPM and OWCP. DOL worked through placing the information from OWCP claims onto EEX. The initiative has been cleared with regard to privacy and technology issues. DOL will forward the OPM agreement to the clients. The system is web based and dependant on the EEX ID and password. DOL has already expended the money and everything to get this system up and operating. DOL would like to migrate this onto the EPP at NFC. The system would operate similar to how it does with EEX. The employee logs into his/her EPP and there will be a link to DOL whereby the employee can review his/her OWCP case. There is no exchange and/or update of data. The system merely provides a review of what is there in DOL's files on the employee's OWCP case. DOL provided documentation on the current system.

Post Meeting Update: PPSPS sent an e-mail today and CAPPS reps must be prepared to provide a go/no-go answer by the next CAPPS meeting (August 17th).

IX. I. Attendees:

A. In-Person:

1. Clients - AG, CFTC, CBO, CSOSA, DOC, DOJ, DOL, FCC, FERC, GAO, HUD, MSPB, Peace Corps, SBA, TR, and USAID

2. NFC - Cliff Lee (Chair), George Morris (co-chair), Jo Bonner, and Jody Nyers.

B. Via Teleconference:

1. Clients -

2. NFC - Penny Forbes, Gary Gaspard, Randy Gonzales, Lambert LeBleu, and Randy Speed