CAPPS Charter
Membership
CAPPS membership consists of one member and one alternate from each Department or independent Agency serviced by the United States Department of Agriculture/National Finance Center Payroll/Personnel System. Representatives from outside of the personnel community may be invited to attend as ex officio members on an ad hoc basis to address auxiliary issues on the agenda. Functional specialists may be invited to attend meetings to discuss problems in their functional area of expertise.
Purpose
CAPPS provides the framework for providing an interface between the Payroll/Personnel System user community, the program staffs at departmental level, and the technical systems staff at NFC. The Committee interacts with the other system users and NFC in implementing, operating, maintaining, and continually improving the automated USDA Payroll/Personnel system. CAPPS provides leadership and guidance to user Agencies regarding the Payroll/Personnel system and ensures the integrity of the system.
Responsibilities
CAPPS Responsibilities:
- Represents all users, large and small, ensuring that user needs are fairly represented within the Payroll/Personnel System.
- Promotes a single basic payroll/personnel system committed to responsible personnel, payroll and time and attendance practices which meet all regulatory and legal requirements.
- Provides a unified approach to system management.
- Identifies, develops, reviews, and recommends payroll/personnel system procedures.
- Identifies, develops, reviews, and recommends proposed system improvements/enhancements and recommends development priorities.
- Assists in the design, testing, and implementation of new payroll/personnel systems.
- Provides technical advice and assistance to the user community.
- Provides a mechanism for sharing problems and solutions among users.
- Develops consensus solutions to problems, system changes or proposed enhancements.
- Recommends system development priorities.
Chairperson
The Chairperson of CAPPS will be a member of the NFC staff. Responsibilities of the Chairperson include:
- Receives, consolidates, develops, and issues agenda items.
- Notifies members of dates, times, and places of scheduled meetings.
- Calls special meetings as needed.
- Distributes notes of the meeting and written findings on matters of arbitration decided upon by USDA management.
- Distributes handouts to members not in attendance.
- Ensures meeting is run in a smooth, orderly manner.
- Requests volunteers for special workgroups.
- Disseminates work to workgroup chairpersons.
- Presents recommended changes with accompanying research, in conjunction with workgroup chairpersons, to CAPPS, USDA management, and NFC.
- Reports on project status in absence of workgroup chairperson.
- Coordinates implementation of recommended changes.
- Submits proposals from NFC or user Agencies to CAPPS for review.
Member Responsibility
Responsibilities of the representatives include:
- Submit agenda items in required format.
- Submit their department's views, comments, and recommendations on changes or enhancements.
- Recommend members to participate as needed.
- Provide a research resource as needed.
- Serve as workgroup chairperson as elected.
Meetings
Meetings will be held on a quarterly basis every third Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. ET via Zoom for Government. Special meetings may be called as needed.
Agenda
The Chairperson should receive agenda items from members at least six working days prior to the scheduled meeting. Agenda items from members should be received by the Chairperson at least six working days prior to the scheduled meeting. The Chairperson will issue agenda items and a reminder of the meeting five working days before the meeting. With the exception of system problems requiring immediate attention, items not received by the due date will be deferred until the next meeting of CAPPS.
Examples of the agenda topics are:
- Requests for changes to the payroll/personnel applications/systems.
- Problems which affect more than one user, i.e., system application versus employee application.
- New applications, e.g., spot awards, etc.
Requests for changes to the application should include:
- Change.
- Reasons why the change is needed.
- Impact on users.
- Regulation, law, etc., if applicable.