Processing History Corrections When History Covers More than One Agency

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Guide to Processing Personnel Actions stipulates that an employee's current Agency is responsible for ensuring all corrections, cancellations, or modifications of the employee’s history record are processed. This means that the Agency that owns the employee’s Official Personnel File makes changes to the Standard Form (SF) 50, Notification of Personnel Action, and the current Agency pays all the costs associated with the corrections including retroactive adjustments.

Background

NFC's Payroll/Personnel System (PPS) is the system responsible for tracking salary, travel, and similar expenditures and reporting such to customer Agencies. When historical corrections with retroactive adjustments are processed, the costs are obligated to the legacy account recorded in the payroll system at the time of the original action. This can result in charges to the wrong Agency. Agencies are responsible for approving all expenditures, and the gaining Agency cannot authorize payment on behalf of the losing Agency.

Therefore, in NFC's PPS when the cancellation/correction process includes actions processed by another Agency, only that Agency can cancel or correct those actions. The cancellation process must be coordinated with PPS processing personnel in both Agencies to ensure the actions are processed in sequence.

Moving from Agency to Agency

In NFC's PPS, when an employee moves from one Agency to another Agency, the employee’s history record is copied to the gaining Agency when the separation action is processed by the losing Agency. This is followed by the processing of the accession action by the gaining Agency which is the sequence prescribed by OPM. After the gaining Agency processes the accession, there are two history records for the employee, and based on a user’s security access, the history for both Agencies is visible in Information/Research Inquiry System (IRIS) Program IR522, SF-50B Data Elements and IRIS Program IR525 Personnel Actions Summary. The losing Agency has access to all data through the date of separation. The gaining Agency has read-only access to all history data on the Personnel History Information System (PERHIS) database. The history data includes history for all previous employment with organizations serviced by NFC. The current Agency has update access to all actions processed during the employee’s employment.

However, when the gaining Agency processes the accession personnel action prior to the losing Agency processing the separation action, the history is not copied from the losing Agency to the gaining Agency resulting in the losing Agency being unable to process the separation action, complete final payments, or transfer leave. The gaining Agency is also unable to see the personnel history for the employee. 

To correct the situation, the gaining Agency must cancel the accession and all subsequent actions. In the pay period after the gaining Agency’s package applies, the losing Agency processes the separation, issues the SF 1150, etc., and then notifies the gaining Agency to reprocess the accession and subsequent actions. The history records for the losing Agency reflect all processed actions including the corrections, and the history records for the gaining Agency reflect the actions processed by the Agency.

Note: It may take multiple pay periods for the Agencies to coordinate and correct the processing of these actions, and the gaining Agency may have to manually pay the employee during the process.

Moving from Agency to Agency - EmpowHR

In EmpowHR, when the employee is moving from one Agency to another Agency, the losing Agency must process the separation action prior to the gaining Agency using the Personnel Action Request (PAR) Processing Departmental Transfer component to gain access to the employee’s record for processing of the accession action. Refer to the EmpowHR PAR Processing procedure for instructions on processing a Departmental Transfer. When the employee does not have a record in EmpowHR, the gaining Agency uses the PAR Processing New Hire component to set up the employee record. There are no history records from the losing Agency for the employee in EmpowHR; therefore, corrections and cancellations to history for the losing Agency must be processed in Web-based Entry, Processing, Inquiry, and Correction System (EPIC Web), History Correction Update Processing System (HCUP). The EPIC Web HCUP component is designed for correcting personnel history data. All history actions are loaded in EPIC Web HCUP, and access is defaulted based on security access.