With the recent changes to pension benefits applicable to employees becoming University of California Retirement Plan (UCRP) eligible on or after July 1, 2013, a new retirement code (W) was established in the Payroll Personnel System (PPS) to identify employees under the “2013 Tier” pension program. With this modification to PPS, it has recently come to our attention that two errors were introduced during the installation of the software update causing departments not to be charged certain benefit costs for this small group of employees associated with the new retirement code.
The first error is related to the UCRP employer paid contributions. Departments were not charge the UCRP employer paid assessments between July and October 2013 for this sub-set of employees. Charges commenced with the November payroll. It is our understanding that at least one other UC campus was impacted by this error. To rectify the missing charges, manual financial journals will be processed for the December 2013 ledgers charging the appropriate Full Accounting Unit (FAU). The Distribution of Payroll Expense (DOPE) for July through October will not be re-run to reflect these charges; however, each journal line will reference the related DOPE ETMO, ETPAGE and ETLINE. In addition, some expired contracts and grants will be impacted; prior to charging an expired contract and grant funds, departments will be contacted to identify an appropriate alternate fund source.
The second error is related to the department vacation accrual assessment. For this sub-set employees associated with the new retirement code, departments have not been assessed for the vacation accrual since the July 2013 payroll. It is our understanding that many UC campuses are experiencing similar errors. Due to the complexity of the vacation accrual assessment, this issue has not yet been resolved, but is currently being reviewed by the PPS programmers at Office of the President. As soon as additional information is available, it will be disseminated to the campus.
I apologize for the inconvenience caused by these errors. Please contact Payroll Director, Gabe Nwandu (gabe.nwandu@ucr.edu), or me (bobbi.mccracken@ucr.edu) with questions or concerns.
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Additional information on the UCRP “2013 Tier”: The Regents approved a new pension tier for employees hired or re-hired July 1, 2013 and later. The new pension tier does not apply to current employees unless they leave employment and return at a later date. The UCRP tier determination is based on when the employee becomes a member and not necessarily based on hire date. Starting July 1, 2013, retirement code ‘W’ is derived for employees (except safety members) who meet the following criteria:
- Hired into an appointment with Full Benefits Eligibility after June 30, 2013.
- Rehired into an appointment with Full Benefits Eligibility after June 30, 2013 with a Break in Service.
- Limited (Casual) employees after working 1,000 hours within 12 consecutive months.
For more information on “2013 Tier” for UCRP, please visit the following website: http://atyourservice.ucop.edu/employees/retirement_savings/ucrp.html