The Federal Aviation Administration and the Veterans Affairs Department are two of the agencies putting the government’s E-Payroll initiative behind schedule. But they have good reasons.
Transportation Department officials had stopped work on the department’s own new human resources system in order to move to a shared-service provider under the E-Payroll umbrella. Most of the department has made the move, but FAA, a part of Transportation, has particularly complicated payroll demands that have slowed its migration. VA has run into similar snags. DOT and VA are two of only eight agencies that have not fully migrated to one of the four E-Payroll providers. And as the Office of Management and Budget’s 25 e-government projects slowly replace duplicative systems, E-Payroll, managed by the Office of Personnel Management, is making good on e-government’s promise of stopping redundant spending by terminating systems and making government more efficient.
“If you minimize the number of systems you are running, you will cut down costs,” said Tom Park, the Transportation Department’s deputy chief financial officer. “The real credit goes to the Federal Aviation Administration for making sure their migration was under control. They will have to make sure business process changes are processing the human resource transactions.” FAA will migrate 50,000 employees to Interior’s National Business Center by Oct. 16. The other 10,000 Transportation employees started using NBC’s system in April, Park said.
OPM officials estimate that E-Payroll will save the government more than $1 billion over 10 years by merging 26 separate payroll systems into four. Officials said 80 percent of all agencies—or 1.4 million employees—migrated to the new providers as of April, seven months behind schedule. “The September 2004 date was a target initially established prior to completion of full requirements definition for each migrating agency,” an OPM spokesperson said. “For some agencies, these requirements were more extensive than originally anticipated and the schedule was adjusted accordingly.”
VA, FAA and the Coast Guard are among those agencies with more extensive requirements.
VA, for instance, pays most of its employees under one section of the U.S. Code, Title 5, but it pays doctors, nurses and other health care workers under Title 38. FAA hires and pays air traffic controllers under Title 49.
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