The Bush administration hopes to make an announcement by mid-November. That's after officials complete an assessment of how the consolidation will affect several hundred employees who now perform payroll duties at their agencies but would probably be transferred to other jobs at federal computer centers.
The payroll consolidation, one of 24 e-government initiatives launched by the Bush administration, is being handled by the Office of Personnel Management. Norm Enger, OPM's e-government program director, said plans call for the executive branch to have only two payroll providers by September 2004.
Enger said 22 agencies currently process pay checks. When OPM surveyed the agencies, only eight expressed interest in continuing with payroll work. "So we asked them to prepare a document telling how they would move toward a vision of standardizing federal pay and moving from legacy software to off-the-shelf software to improve their efficiency," Enger said.
DFAS, GSA, Interior and Agriculture submitted superior proposals, but a review board considered none of them ideal, Enger said. The review board, which includes Office of Management and Budget officials, suggested the partnership approach. The two teams submitted proposals to consolidate their operations.
Enger said DFAS, which processes pay for more than 600,000 people every month, partnered with GSA, which has experience in serving smaller agencies. Officials thought that "adding that capability to DFAS would be a good combination," Enger said.
Interior's National Business Center, based in Denver, has a good reputation for customer service, and Agriculture's finance center, in New Orleans, has a long history of handling large volumes of work, such as payroll services for 500,000 people in addition to maintaining records for the Thrift Savings Plan, Enger said.
Through the consolidation, Enger said, OPM hopes to develop a uniform system for calculating and processing the civil service payroll. "The federal civilian payroll has been evolving in an unstructured manner, with no rhyme or reason," he said.
Once the government adopts a standard practice, Enger hopes that software companies will develop payroll packages that will allow the government to integrate its personnel management and payroll systems.
A companion initiative, called e-enterprise human resource integration, seeks to develop an electronic personnel folder (replacing about 150 paper forms) that would follow an employee from job to job inside the government and into retirement. The integration project also would allow agencies to submit data to an electronic warehouse, where OPM could track employment trends and analyze skills and training requirements from a government-wide perspective, Enger said.
Quelle: Washington Post
