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NBC Profile |
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NBC PROFILE - SUMMER 2005
Casual Workers' Pay Moves to Interior's Personnel/Payroll System |
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The NBC is pleased to announce that payment processing for emergency firefighters (EFF) and other emergency workers (both groups collectively being referred to as Casual Workers) is now accomplished through the Department of the Interior's (DOI) Federal Personnel Payroll System (FPPS). These are payments in support of four DOI bureaus (the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs) and the Department of Agriculture's Forest Service. Starting January 3, 2005, payments to over 30,000 Casual Workers have been made by the FPPS, and payments to vendors that supported them at incidents have been made by their agency's finance system.
The fire community within both the DOI and the Forest Service, in conjunction with the NBC, was able to accomplish this project in approximately one year, to include defining user requirements, changing the software, and migrating historical records to the FPPS. This significant achievement is providing enhanced capabilities and better service to the entire EFF community and will also result in efficiencies for the NBC. The FPPS needed to be modified to satisfy EFF requirements. These modifications included: new functionality to support EFF daily payment and deduction needs; adjustment capability; enhanced input screens with point-and- click navigation and drop-down capability; and other FPPS system changes to make processing EFF pay more efficient.
On January 3, 2005, the DOI "retired" the Emergency Firefighter/Vendor Pay (EFF/VP) system that had been used for years to pay these workers and vendors. The EFF/VP application was written over 20 years ago, and while it served its purpose well for years, its capabilities were limited and it had become difficult to maintain. The system environment could not support increased capacity, more stringent DOI security requirements, or meet the clients' future needs. It was determined that the system needed to be replaced; and at the recommendation of an independent contractor, the EFF Steering Committee chose the FPPS as the most cost effective and efficient solution to replace the EFF/VP system. Also, given Office of Management and Budget's e-Payroll Initiative to reduce the number of Federal government payroll systems, the FPPS was the logical solution to avoid building or purchasing a new system. This decision also provides an opportunity for the NBC to provide its services to other agencies that pay non-Federal emergency workers and again achieve economies-of-scale on a Federal government-wide basis.
The fire community now has enhanced data input capability, additional system features available, and significantly more analysis and reporting capability through the FPPS DataMart than it had during the NBC's management of the EFF/VP system. At the fire site, a major process improvement under the FPPS is that hard-copy checks are no longer prepared directly by the payment teams. All EFF pay is now done exclusively by electronic fund transfer directly to the worker's financial institution or by other payment methods issued by the U.S. Treasury.
This conversion of EFF and vendor pay is a true success story based on a solid team effort involving a collection of organizations and individuals with the objective of improving the processing of pay for Casual Workers and providing enhanced security and reporting capability. The NBC is proud and excited that this effort has now come to fruition, as it provides benefits to all of those agencies that partnered in it.
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