CAR Newsletter May 2024

Volume 34, Number12 | Fiscal Year 2024 | June 7, 2024

ACCOUNTNG

• FY 2024 Year-End Miscellaneous Claim Vouchers and Orders Processing
• Travel Reimbursement Crossing Fiscal Years
• P-card Submission Reminder
• Workday@OK Costing Allocation Update
• Form 11 Reconciliation
• Payroll 789 Fund Reconciliation
• Payroll 994 Fund Reconciliation

PAYROLL

• Correction to May’s Article: Employee Direct Deposit Verification of Bank Routing Number
• Employee Direct Deposit Updates
• Update Wage Assignments vs Garnishments/Withholding Orders
• Changes in Fees for SoonerSave Deferred Savings Plan
• Changes in Fees for Pathfinder Retirement Plan
• No Change in State Share of Oklahoma Public Employees Retirement System
• No Change in Employer Contribution Rate for Justices and Judges Retirement System
• No Change in State Share of Oklahoma Law Enforcement Retirement System
• Change in Contribution Rates for Teachers' Retirement System
• Schedule of FY 2025 Pay Periods
• New ChartField Value Added

HIGHER EDUCATION PAYROLL

• Form EWC – PFT Reversals
• Higher Ed Deferred Payroll

TRAINING

• Free Constructing Compliance Webinar on June 26
• Oklahoma Payroll ORG
• 2024 Annual Statewide Conference

Following are the procedures for closing out the current fiscal year and then beginning the new fiscal year activity:

• Miscellaneous claim voucher processing. Voucher batches received by 1 p.m. on Thursday, June 27, will be processed for payment by the close of business June 28. Vouchers received at OMES after 1 p.m. may be held and processed for payment in FY 2025. Vouchers may be created through 5 p.m. on June 27 to accrue for 2024 expenditures in FY 2025. New vouchers should not be created on Friday, June 28, since that day is reserved for fiscal year closing activities. Agencies should resolve all voucher exceptions by the close of business on June 28. New vouchers may be created beginning on Monday, July 1.
• EDT vouchers submission. Agencies uploading voucher data via EDT transmissions (vouchers from remote) should provide for sufficient internal lead time so that vouchers arrive at OMES by the 1 p.m. deadline on June 27. Alternate system agency vouchers transmitted after noon on June 27 will be paid on Friday, June 28. Do not submit EDT transmissions on June 28. EDT agencies should resolve all voucher exceptions by the close of business on June 28. New EDT transmissions may be submitted beginning on Monday, July 1.
• Manual warrants. The cutoff for issuing manual warrants is noon on Thursday, June 27, for non-alternate system agencies and 5 p.m. for alternate system agencies. Agencies whose warrants are entered in the system by OMES must have the supporting paperwork to OMES by 5 p.m. on Thursday, June 27. Manual warrants should not be issued to payees after these deadlines since vouchers should not be created on June 28. Beginning Monday, July 1, manual warrants may be issued and the associated voucher created.
• 340 fund expenditures. Expenditure entries for 340 funds for June 27 and prior must be received by 9 a.m. on June 28 to be processed in FY 2024. Expenditure entries for 340 funds for June 28 must be received by 2 p.m. on June 28 to be processed in FY 2024.

WARNING! 2024 expenses due early in July 2024

Payments for 2025 expenses (e.g., July rent) may not be paid with 2024 budget. These payments may not be paid until the agency receives its 2025 budget. Agencies should notify vendors and contractors of this end-of-year processing dilemma, which could delay payment beyond the due date.

Reminder from Transaction Processing:

Per the Statewide Accounting Manual, Chapter 10.5.2:
Payment of expenses is restricted to amounts applicable to the fiscal year in which the travel occurred. In addition, payment shall be subject to the availability of the amounts in the agency’s budget.

Vouchers for reimbursement of travel expenses shall not cover more than one fiscal year (74 O.S. § 500.3). In cases where the travel period (days claimed) extends beyond the end of the fiscal year, the travel voucher must be closed and a subsequent voucher submitted for the remainder of the trip in the next fiscal year. In addition, the first travel voucher must be annotated to show the travel period is continuous and a copy submitted with the second voucher for verification of the payment history of expenses claimed. If submitted together, a copy of the second voucher must be included with the first voucher.

Agencies must split the travel expenses at midnight: one voucher will end travel status at 11:59 p.m. on June 30, and the second voucher will begin travel status at midnight on July 1. Lodging incurred the night of June 30 and morning of July 1 should be included on the June 30 voucher. Be sure to cross-reference each voucher for audit purposes. For additional questions regarding this procedure, please email omestptravel@omes.ok.gov.

OMES Central Accounting and Reporting Transaction Processing makes one combined payment to the issuing bank each month on behalf of the P-card program. In order to avoid late fees, interest charges and a reduction of the rebate earned, all agencies shall have their vouchers turned in to OMES CAR by the deadline schedule listed on the P-card page of the OMES website. The schedule is set up one year in advance and the dates do not change from what is listed. 

Agencies not complying with the voucher-build deadline will first be notified of the missed deadline in writing. If the deadline is missed again, the agency will need to attend additional training with the state P-card administrator and OMES CAR Transaction Processing at a cost of $150. On the third occasion, that agency’s program will be suspended for three months.

An email was sent to agency CFOs and Finance officers on June 4 with instructions and a job aid for mass year-end updates to costing allocations for positions in Workday@OK. By using the Excel spreadsheet report from Workday@OK and following the job aid instructions, agencies will be able to submit all of their costing allocations at once in an upload format which will save a large amount of time. We have improved our process to allow for costing allocation on vacant PINs to process through the upload as well this year! If your agency did not receive this communication, please contact bethany.patterson@omes.ok.gov. Biweekly agencies must submit the file by June 26, and monthly agencies must submit the file by July 3.

As we approach fiscal year-end, it is critically important that Clearing and ASA reconciliations and transfers to the General Revenue Fund be completed timely. Transfers to the General Revenue Fund are due by the 10th of every month, and the reconciliation is due to OMES by the 20th of every month.

If your reconciliations are not up to date, your journal entries cannot be posted timely, resulting in various balances being misstated at fiscal year-end.  

Higher Ed agencies must reconcile their payroll class fund 78900 regularly. If an institution experiences cash shortages on payroll tax deposits or has unidentified balances in their fund accounts, this may be due to incorrect account codes used on 789 voucher payments. If payments have been processed with incorrect account codes, corrections should be made using a journal voucher. In addition, if payments that should have been made from the 789 fund were processed from a different class funding or if payments were made from the 789 fund and amounts were not transferred to the fund, a journal voucher must be processed to reflect the fund it should have been paid from. Payments from the 789 fund should only be made for amounts that were deposited into the fund. Monthly reconciliation is recommended and will allow institutions to find errors on a timelier basis so that taxes or other payments are not delayed due to lack of cash in the fund. 

All agencies should be reconciling their Payroll Withholding fund, 99400, on a monthly basis. This fund receives amounts for various voluntary and involuntary payroll withholdings to the 633XXX accounts after payroll processes, which the agency pays out on H vouchers. The fund should remain at a zero balance; it should never have a negative balance.

With the change in Workday@OK, employees entering direct deposit information no longer have to upload documents for approval of their payment election.

Please advise employees that when entering their direct deposit information, a bank routing/transit number should never start with the digit 5. This indicates a branch of the bank. Workday@OK does have an algorithm to verify routing numbers are valid; however, the algorithm may not catch all invalid numbers. If an invalid routing number is used and processed to the Office of the State Treasurer, their validation will fail. A failed direct deposit does not leave OST for payment and additional processing is required of the agency to get the employee paid.

The State of Oklahoma, as an employer, does not process wage assignments. We must be ordered by the courts or required by federal/state law to withhold a debt amount from an employee’s wages.

Garnishments/Withholding Orders include creditor garnishments, tax levies, administrative wage garnishments, support orders, bankruptcy orders and student loans, to name a few.

Wage Assignments occur when an employee voluntarily agrees to have an amount deducted from their paycheck. Employers can choose whether they process a wage assignment, and, if so, the creditor will receive the amount withheld from the employee without obtaining a court order. Wage assignments do not fall under the Federal Consumer Credit Protection Act (CCPA) and can be used for any type of payment (pay day loans, bill payments, etc.). Basically, the employer is paying an employee’s bills by doing this.

O.S. 62 § 304.2 does not authorize the assignment of salary or wages. Agencies should not be entering wage assignments in Workday@OK. RPT00076 can be run to identify all employees with withholding orders. Enter the agency and pay period to review. For deductions, type in Wage Assignment, then select Withholding Order (Wage Assignment); hit OK to run. Once the results show, review those set as wage assignments. If set as wage assignment in error, a correction will be needed. 

Agencies can also run the DC Validation Worker Withholding Orders report to see all employees with orders to catch any that may not have processed yet through payroll, filtering on the Type column with a value of Wage Assignment.

As a reminder, if the entity is not on the Voluntary Payroll Deduction program list of vendors and is not a court order or required by federal/state law, by statute we should not be withholding the amount.

The rate certified for the administrative cost to be calculated in payrolls submitted for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2024, has changed to $5.68 per month for any qualified participant. The equivalent amount for a biweekly pay period is $2.62. This change will be reflected in any payrolls submitted with a pay period code of M01 or B01.

The rate certified for the administrative cost to be calculated in payrolls submitted for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2024, has changed to $0.00 per month for any qualified participant. The equivalent amount for a biweekly pay period is $0.00. This change will be reflected in any payrolls submitted with a pay period code of M01 or B01. The change to no administrative fee is due to prior forfeitures being approved by the Board of Trustees for OPERS to pay administrative costs of the plan.

The amount the State of Oklahoma pays for employee retirement will remain at 16.5% for FY 2025.

The amount the State of Oklahoma pays for employee retirement will remain at 22.0% for FY 2025.

The amount the State of Oklahoma pays for employee retirement will remain at 11.0% for FY 2025.

The federal matching contribution rate for the Teachers Retirement System will decrease from 8.4% to 8.0% for FY 2025. The federal matching contribution rate must be paid when salaries are paid by federal funds or externally sponsored agreements such as grants, contracts and cooperative agreements. Other TRS contribution rates remain the same for FY 2025. For a complete list of rates, please see Federal and External Matching Rate FY25.pdf

Please distribute the FY 2025 Pay Date schedules, found at ScheduleofFY25PayPeriods, to Payroll and Human Resources directors. Questions on the codes may be directed to payrollreporting@omes.ok.gov.

A new payroll detail expenditure account code has been added to PeopleSoft Financials:

511410: COMPENSATION - EXTRA DUTY
Payroll – Payments for authorized extra duty pay.

In Workday@OK, the following earnings have been mapped to the new account code:

Extra Duty Flat Amount Allowance
PUD Extra Duty Pay

This change will allow a separation of extra duty pay from regular pay and will be reflected separately for transparency reporting purposes.

All Electronic Warrant Cancellation (EWC) forms that are associated with payroll warrants must have PFT Reversal files processed before the warrants are canceled in the PeopleSoft Financial system. Agencies are notified when funds have come back from the bank and are instructed to process the PFT Reversal file(s). A PFT Reversal file must be submitted timely in order for the agency to move the money from the 789 class fund and return the amounts to the funds that were used for the payroll. When this process isn’t completed, the net pay and associated withholdings remain in the 789 class fund and are not available for the agency to use as needed.

NOTE: Institutions are required to reconcile the 789 class funding no less than monthly. All balances remaining in the 789 class funding must be documented and identifiable. The only balance left in a 789 class funding after a payroll should be related to timing differences.

Payroll claims for hours worked in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 on one payroll fund transfer file will record payroll expenses to the institution’s operating funds with bud refs 24 and 25. The claim number will begin with 25, which will require that all class 78900 transactions on the PFT file be recorded with bud ref 25. The first two digits of the claim number determine which 78900 budget is used for the net payroll vouchers, so all 78900 transactions on the PFT must be recorded with bud ref 25 to ensure the same allotment budget is used. Please ensure the FY 2025 78900 allotment budget is sufficient for the FY 2024 expenses paid in July and August 2024.

If a payroll contains only FY 24 expenses, then the claim number will be 24aaaxxxxx and the PFT bud ref will be 24.

If a payroll has FY 24 and FY 25 expenses, then the claim number will be 25aaaxxxxx and the PFT bud refs for the operating funds (290, 430, 700) will be as applicable and the 789 bud ref must be 25.

If a payroll contains only FY 25 expenses, then the claim number will be 25aaaxxxxx and the PFT bud ref will be 25.

The Department of Labor's recently published final rule, Updating the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts Regulations, is the first comprehensive DBRA regulatory review in nearly 40 years. The final rule updates and modernizes the regulations implementing the DBRA at 29 CFR parts 1, 3 and 5 with the goal of increasing efficiency of administration of the act and enhancing protections for covered construction workers.

Presented by the U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division, this free training will discuss these important changes, including regulatory updates to certified payrolls, record keeping, site of work, prevailing wages and fringe benefits, conformances, overtime and executive orders. 

Contracting officers, federal contractors, human resources and payroll professionals and others involved in federal construction contracts will benefit from this webinar. We encourage you to join us Wednesday, June 26, from 9 a.m.-noon. Use the registration link below to save your spot.

Understanding Federal & State Unemployment Tax Zoom Event

June 28: 1-2 p.m.

Presentation Information can be accessed on the Oklahoma Payroll Org website.

Payroll Magic 24th Annual Oklahoma Payroll Conference

Sept. 6: 9 a.m.

Presentation Information can be accessed on the Oklahoma Payroll Org website.