Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Rita Gallardo: Thank you very much. I was actually at a class and it was really important
to me to come back and welcome you all to our campus here at CalPERS. We hope that you
find the meeting to be very productive and if there's anything that you'd like to share
with me after the meeting, my staff is available or I'm available to you always, either by
e-mail or by phone. And so, as we're moving forward, we want to make sure that folks are
probably aware that at the end of the meeting, we'll be asking for agenda items for the next
meeting, so I hope you're thinking about what it is you'd like to hear and have CalPERS
present.
And so in order to get the meeting started, I want to go ahead and invite Danny back up
to go ahead and review the legislative update that CalPERS has. After Danny, we'll make
sure that we're moving forward with meeting because I'm going to go ahead and go back
to my training. I am going to have staff give you some housekeeping updates and answer any
additional questions that you may have about the logistics of our meeting. Once again,
I want to thank you guys for being here. It's important to us that we maintain and continue
working on our relationships with you. Any comments or questions that you have, I'm always
available. Thank you very much.
Danny: All right, well then hello again. I don't' think I had a chance to introduce myself
when I was up here earlier, but 'm Danny Brown. I'm the chief of the Governmental Affairs
Office and so I'm going to talk a little bit about legislation. It's still early. The legislative
deadline to introduce bills is February 21st, so I guess we're expecting a flurry of activity
over the next few weeks. If you looked at the list that was provided in your packet,
I believe those bills are really just leftovers from last year still. There hasn't been anything
introduced this year that brings to the level of what we would call putting on our B list
or a master list and bringing to our board's attention, so it's still been fairly quiet
around pensions. And I guess in some ways, we expect that to continue to be the case,
as the legislature just wants to say that pension reform has been done and they want
to watch and see how PEPRA works and then somewhere down the road, maybe they'll take
something up again.
I will let you know that we are bringing forward kind of a housekeeping minor policy bill.
We took it to our board in December. It hasn't gone into print yet, so I don't have a bill
number, but again, it'll be one of those bills that will be introduced in the next couple
of weeks.
There's really only a couple. Most of it is really technical. A couple pieces that I'll
bring to your attention, which might be of interest. For those of you that have to correct
payroll, you may know that our current policy is if you're correcting payroll with the results
and adding additional payroll, then we charge you whatever the employer contribution is
at that current time, so even if you're correcting payroll corrections from three years ago,
you're paying the current contribution and vice versa. If you're backing out payroll,
you're getting a credit based on the current contribution rate. We are requesting a change
that we would charge you whatever the contribution rate at the time the payroll was originally
reported. So if you're correcting payroll from three years ago, you will get charged
what the contribution rate was three years ago. So those are the situations that actually
gain for you because I'm sure three years ago, the contribution rates were less. If
you're backing out payroll, then you're going to see a smaller credit than you would get.
So, in some cases you'll win, some cases you'll lose, but I think we feel it's the fairest
way. It's the best practice and now with myCalPERS, we're restoring the historical rates and so
it should be easy for everybody to calculate that number. So we're making that change.
The other small change that impacts members is current **** when someone retires. The
way the statute reads is they have 30 days...or they have to, they can make a change to their
optional benefit up until the first check goes out. Again, with myCalPERS and the way
it works, some checks go out sooner than others and so to be consistent, we're going to change
the law that says that you have 30 days after the first check is set to make a change to
your optional benefit. It's something that may impact your members.
So those are just the two things in that piece of legislation that I wanted to point out.
Again, we're not...I'm not even really hearing any rumors about any potential legislation.
Most of the things that people are talking about are still around health care, health
vesting schedules, trying to deal with OPED benefits, things like that, but on the pension
front it's still, its' fairly quiet. Any questions from anybody?
Q: Hi I'm Vina Chachi from Orange County. The one you just mentioned about using the
rate of that year, the correction, that's going to be a lot of work. That's going to
be a lot of work the way the system is to build and be able to see when we go and look
back at the records, what did we pay for this employee.
Danny: Well, I don't know if anybody from Payroll is here to help me, but I don't think
you have to look. I think the system will tell you, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Vina: But by then, we are done when the information comes to you. When by the time we send you
the file, we have already calculated what's in our system. And it's going to be kind of
a...it will require program changes and, I mean it's going to be a lot of work, that's
what I want to say. And you are saying you might not get anything anyway.
Tim Herrback: So, currently it's really only going to impact your employer rate. And employer
rates are calculated outside of your payroll file. Member rates generally are included
in you payroll file as member contributions only. And once your payroll file processes
and posts, your file submissions or however you do it, that's when we then generate the
employer cost and associate it to your receivable. And so, what we're seeing right now is if
you posted a regular period payroll record, right, in 2000 when there was zero employer
cost or 5% employer cost, and now you're backing out that payroll transaction, you're getting
a 32, 36 or 40% credit back when you only paid 6%. Or vice versa. Today there's a lot
of people who are doing prior period adjustments to increase earnings and you're getting charged
current rate, when before, if you would have posted it correctly the first time back in
2002, you would have been charged a much lower rate. So what this is is it is making it streamline
and consistent with the posting of how you did payroll and it only really truly will
impact the employer rate to make it fair, both for positive and negative adjustments.
I know there are some cases where a member rate could have changed, either due to cost
share or there was a change and the member rate went from maybe 6% to 7%. In those cases,
yeah, there may be some programming changes on your end, but for the most part for submitting
payroll to us, it should be easy. It's more work on our end to do that back in validation
and go, okay begin date here and here, match it to the rates.
Vina: No, it's true that our employer share is calculated outside anyway, but when we
send you the money, we look at the total earnings and use one rate because that's all it knows.
There is one employer rate and we will have, let's say there is one person who should be
10%, so we will have to....are you going to bill us later and that's when we make corrections?
Tim: As soon as you post your payroll report, it generates a receivable, so you should be
able to generate the contribution details report and it shows you exactly how much employer
rates were charged per each transaction. And once the receivable is there, you can actually
look at the detail function to see what was the final employer contributions per rate
plan. Now, I'm not saying it's not going to be *** employers to try to make that adjustment
from an employer posting perspective, but it's not going in right away. Obviously it
means it's going to take time for this to get approved, but it's the correct way to
do billing, is to make sure money in equals money out and money out equals money in, based
on what you were charged for that period of time.
Vina: I mean, I do understand for bookkeeping purposes, but at the same time, I know it's
going to increase. We will have to store every year's pay rate in our system now. Whenever
it goes in affect. It's going to be work, that's all I wanted you to know.
Q: Frances from LA County. It's actually no different than the way CalSTRS works. Right
now, we have to store prior rates to apply to the period of time we're affecting when
the rate was different on the employer's side. My question is that when this is implemented,
if we change our program to calculate an adjustment for a prior rate, can we just report it that
way? Because when we remit contributions, we remit 95% in advance of actually submitting
the data file. And so if we include the actual calculation rate for the period affected,
it should be correct and it would be accepted, right?
Tim: Right.
Q: I agree that, you know, absolutely for accounting persons, we want the ins to equal
the outs and etcetera, etcetera. They always should. But what we're kind of hoping because
it would require some system changes on our part, we're hoping that you're going to allow
enough lee time for us to implement it, make system changes and implement this. Otherwise,
it's going to be just really, really difficult for us.
Tim: So, what I can say is once they do their part and we get it approved, right, there
has to be to legislation to approve this to go through. Once it's approved, then we have
to submit a ticket to say okay, now make the updates to myCalPERS. We're not going to submit
the updates and make the changes to myCalPERS and then all of a sudden not have this be
approved. Right. We have to wait for it to be approved and then once we are going to
submit that ticket, in the new process, it's going to take three months to six months for
us to even get those changes implemented. So what we can do, Brad and I, once we know
this is approved and we submit the ticket to get this implemented in myCalPERS, we can
then send out a communication to all employers, saying in the next six months, we anticipate
this going in, this release on this date, which will give you a leeway.
Now, I'm not saying it's going to be a year or two years leeway. It can only be three
months to six months, but since we're telling you this now, it may be something you want
to bring up to your IT people. Say, in the next two years or however long it's going
to take, they're looking to implement this and we should probably start meriting what
we do for STRS.
Q: Do we have an estimated time line? I mean...
Danny: Well, I would assume that the soonest the governor, this would get to the governor's
desk is August. It would go into affect on January 1st 2015, so that would be the earliest
that they could implement, but again, I think assuming that the governor signs in this August
or September, they could put in their ticket then and then it would go into affect some
time in 2015.
We wouldn't ask you to fix anything you've already submitted. It would just be any corrections
forward. The new rule to any corrections you're making.
Q: This is Carol from Butte College. Just perhaps a request or suggestion. Starting
something new like this at the beginning of a new fiscal year seems to work best for us.
And number 2, you mentioned that this is primarily on the employer rate because that's what has
changed, but looking ahead a few years, when we could have variable employee rates because
of PEPRA and whatever, will it be applicable to both sides?
Danny: Yes. Okay. Any questions out there or anything that you guys have heard and want
to talk about before I turn it over to the next person? Nope. Okay.
Linda Evans: Thank, you, Danny. Tim.
Tim: I feel like I stole some of Danny's' thunder. So, I'm Tim Herrback. I'm the Staff
Services Manager over at the Business Partners Support Unit. Many of you have met me or talked
to me or sent me e-mails. In the last presentation, it was asked that I come up here and kind
of give you an update of where we are with myCalPERS, some of the upcoming changes that
may be coming in the next couple of months and what we are envisioning occurring and
some of our upcoming releases. I'm going to go over a little bit of the release schedule,
so that's what I'm here for. If you have any specific questions, if you have any specific
issues that you've brought and wanted me to address, I think we will have a little bit
of time after this is all done. I can stay here and log in remotely and try to work out
some of your problems and, if need be, we can go back to my desk and we'll try and figure
out some other way to fix some of your current problems.
But right now, I just want to present on where we are with myCalPERS. So what we're going
to cover is how to create and maintain system contacts. And this is a caveat. I did reach
out to a couple of you via e-mail and these were the topics that we're asked to kind of
share. So if you're seeing something on here that you really want to talk about, let me
know, and I can kind of talk to you afterwards, but this is what was asked for me to present.
So, I'm going to go over how to maintain contacts. Some of the new and enhanced cognize reports:
How to track retired and annuitant hours, these are your retired and annuitant appointments,
how to manage participant appointment details, how to report retroactive salary adjustments,
and then effectively correcting payroll errors. And I'll just go over a couple of payroll
errors that I know many of you probably experience and have a little heartburn with and, you
know, trouble through, so I'll try to figure out ways that I can preventatively give you
the information needed so you don't have to call the call center.
So the first one, Creating and Maintaining Contacts: This weekend, we're actually doing
a release hopefully to myCalPERS and I did a presentation already at the Ed Forum regarding
this topic, but starting Tuesday, when you get back from the holidays, it'll be almost
like how you log into your bank accounts. You'll be asked to select a pretty picture,
you know, a pretty dog or a wine glass or a rainbow or whatever. Give your security
phrase, whatever your security phrase is, and then you can also include your e-mail
and a phone number and when you log in going forward, you'll always see your little pretty
picture and your phrase that you know for security purposes, you log into myCalPERS.
In addition, if you ever forget your password, you can now request the temporary password
be sent to either an e-mail that you defined or if you want a text message coming to your
cell phone, there's different ways that you can reset your password if you forgot it.
You will have to update your challenge questions. So that's the one drawback to this is that
we're wiping clean all your current challenge questions and asking you to re-answer. Instead
of five challenge questions, we've knocked it down to three, so three challenge questions.
So that should come out on Tuesday and I'm hoping we have no issues and I know if we
do have issues, everyone of you will tell me about it. So I am keeping my fingers crossed.
Adding New Contacts: We also changed starting in March, how you can add new contacts. Today,
when you add new contacts, you can either give us a CalPERS idea, you can make up a
person's name or if it's like a consultant for an outside party, you can give us "other"
as an option. Well, the problem with adding a person's name is if you add it and it doesn't
match how the enrollment for that person was submitted, we in essence can create in the
background process, multiple CalPERS IDs. It doesn't really show on your end, but it
just creates a lot of additional CalPERS IDs on our end, so we got rid of the ability for
you to type in a person's name and we're now requesting that when you enroll somebody,
if that person is going to be a contact, you find their CalPERS ID and add them using their
CalPERS ID. We are, though, streamlining, how you define the contacts. No longer are
you going to see General Main and General Other and then General Primary. To me, it
never made sense what a General Other Primary was. So right now, we are going to say, is
this your general contact to call for basic questions and then, who is your general primary
contact. Like, Frances, I know, if I have the first question, she is the first point
of contact. If I can't reach her, I can kind of go down. The other part about how we create
contact is hopefully eventually by June or July of this year, we're still working on
how we distribute communications. So we are going to start tying specific types of communications
to specific types of contacts. The majority of all documents are sent to the General Primary
Contacts preferred method of communication. So that's a good default, but I would suggest
if you're the person that should also get the health billing, the enrollment details,
financial invoices, you could also add yourself as multiple contacts. So I know I'm in the
system as a General. The payroll, the health, all of them as a primary contact, so regardless
of what notice you send me, I get it. And that's what I would say for yourselves, you
know, to do that.
Also, you can have, and I know we've stressed this before in training, and some other environment
or forums, but you can't have multiple system access administrators. Really all that does
is, who is the person your staff goes to reset their password or to add and remove security
rights or to deactivate contacts. If your agency only has one system access administrator,
then that person is probably being overworked because they're the only one that can reset
passwords. So my recommendation is at least have a couple and let your staff know who
they can go to. Because right now, if they call the call center and say I need my password
reset, the call center is going to put them back to you. They won't reset passwords. And
that's for security issues. So, please try and make more than one.
Contact Types: When we had some contact types and we brought some over from the Legacy system
and also when you create it right when we launched myCalPERS, a lot of times we didn't
require the preferred method of communication, either via mailing or e-mail, so when I look
at some of your contacts, and I tried doing this behind the scenes and not tell you about
it, but if I'm talking to you, I'll look at your contact type and see if the mailing option
has a red required asterisks and there's no information there. I'll just select mailing
and it pre-populates your PO Box or your mailing address and if I don't see you have a preferred
method of communication set, but you do provide us your e-mail address, I'll either put it
to your e-mail address or ask you, do you want it to go to the normal business. So what
I would say is when you go back to the office, just check your contact type and see do you
have your preferred method of communication assigned to how you want communications sent
to you and does the address detail have information in it. It's quick. It only takes 10 seconds.
We already went over contact types we used to distribute information, so I won't go over
that.
Maintain Preferred Method of Communication Address: Like I just said, just identify who
it is. If we don't have a primary contact defined, then most likely, it'll go to your
agency's preferred method of communication. And you can find out what that is when you
go to your profile tab and you see your agency name and Federal tax ID number. There should
be like an e-mail address and a phone number. If that's not pre-populated, you can fix that
as well, but most of the times it is. So if we have nobody defined, that's where your
notices are going to. And if you're not getting notices and you really should be, my next
recommendation is periodically, weekly just check the doc history link on the left hand
side and you'll be able to see all the notices that we've sent to you.
Revoking System Access: A lot of times I'll get contacts from people saying so-and-so
doesn't work here any more. How do I get rid of them? You can actually deactivate the person
by going in and giving us the current date. If you use today's date, just know it won't
actually disappear until tomorrow, but it doesn't delete them permanently. If they ever
come back to you, you can actually bring them back to life, in essence. You go to Contact
Types, I want to See All, and you'll see a list of your deactivated people, so you don't
have to re-add them. You just reactivate them.
We are adding a feature come March. Because I know some of you are like, well I can't
even get rid of this person because they're my primary IT person and it tells me that
I can't deactivate them until another primary person is, but that type is not even available
in my drop down box. So how do I get rid of these people?
In March, we should be able to give you the ability to delete somebody altogether. And
that functionality should only occur if the person never should have worked for you and
never been a contact, you can delete them. And it won't even validate against the primary
types. So hopefully that'll save you guys a lot of the heartache you're doing now when
you're trying to manage your contacts.
New Enhanced Cognize Reports: Two of these are related to the fiscal services and I think
what they did is they took the comments received during the Ed Forum about how employers are
tracking payments and receivables. So we have two now cognize reports. The first one is
the employer payment report. And this report provides a detailed list of payments, the
authorization date, the posting date, a confirmation sent by EFT and the dollar amount being sent.
So if you ever want to see, you know, what payments you've submitted throughout the entire
fiscal year, that's another report that's now available for you. We have the employer
receivable report, which lists all the current receivables, the due date for your next receivable,
the next payment date, the current outstanding balance if you have one or credit and a description
of what that receivable is. Again, if you just want to see your receivables, this is
something different than making payments and it's available.
There's another report out there that's similar to these two and I think it gives a combination
of both, but from what I understand in talking to Fiscal Services, this is what employers
ask for when trying to reconcile their payments posted against the receivables generated over
an entire fiscal year.
Back in January, I believe, we also created a retired annuitant hours report. A lot of
times, we get calls from employers saying I don't even know when my retirees are approaching
900 hours or 800 hours. It'd be nice if you told us because we don't track that all the
time. So we made two changes. The first thing is we created a retired annuitant hours work
report, so this should capture all retirees and the total hours you report per fiscal
year. So you can generate on yourself. You can either do it for a month, two months or
for the entire year. There is a defect with this right now, so if you run it for an entire
fiscal year, and you have optional members, they may appear. They're not supposed to be
appearing. So we're going to work to get rid of optional members. But these are actually...it's
only supposed to be for retired annuitants.
Enhanced Reports: The Participant Appointment Details report, this is for your IT folk.
Really this report, I use all the time. There's like five different reports that give you
the same data. We have the CalPERS ID Appointment report. It just gives you anybody who enrolled
their CalPERS ID and appointment ID. Your IT told me, like Orange County contact, it
means that that's not what we need. I need to know who is this for. I have 20 John Does.
I need to get an SS and a DOB, something other than just John Doe, CalPERS ID and appointment
ID. We have the Pension Enrollment report, which gives you anybody who is enrolled and
their current pension status. And their formula and rates. But it doesn't give you a lot of
the other information. I love this report, the Participant Appointment Details report,
because it gives you everything. It gives you all the person's information, their rates,
their benefit provisions. The problem is with the original report, when you ran it, it ran
it from the day you first contracted with us. Which means if you have 200,000 people
since you first started, or more, this report probably took three hours to run. We now made
it to where you can give us a date range of how you want it. So that should speed up the
efficiency of this report.
Also, Frances, if you ever ran this report, you probably brought all myCalPERS down. So
if you ever experience lag times or why the system was going really slowly, it's because
some cognize reports in the background were taking all the data and slowing down performance.
So we're hoping the new enhancement will improve performance and also improve the ability for
your IT to get data quicker than four hours.
Arrears Receivable report: This is one of the ones that we've also...it's out there
now. It's not 100% working right. I heard all your guys' comments. I get an invoice,
I don't know who it's for. Great. Here's a cognize report. We tell you who it's for.
All right, now I know who it's for, but what is it for? Right? So what we did was we added
additional columns that say here who it's for, what division it was created for and
it's supposed to include all the payroll details that you provided our service credit purchase
unit that was used in the original calculation. Hold your questions.
The problem with it right now is for schools, when you guys went from that 6002 coverage
group code to 6004, it's supposed to create two different receivables because they're
two different coverage group codes. Two different benefits, right? And so, if a person was working
from 1998 and the arrears is from 1998 to 2002, it's supposed to create two receivables,
one from 1998 to 2001 and then one from 2001 to 2002. And then it's supposed to show the
payroll details for each of those periods. If you run this cognize report right now,
it's showing all payroll details for both periods under both receivables. So it could
be a little confusing, just know that the receivables were created correctly. I have
this already escalated as a priority release. We're testing it pretty soon. And I'm hoping
to get it applied by March to get the fix done.
But for right now, if you go back and you want to see a receivables and you're like,
there's a lot of data here, this looks duplicate, that's the reason why. The other thing is
we also allowed you just to plug into Receivable IDs, so if you wanted to know who the receivable
was for, before we'd allow you to give us the receivable, you had to give us a date
range. Now you can say, I want to know who this receivable specifically is for. Put that
in the input parameters and the report should give you that data. Again, I'm trying to give
you as much information as possible to make your jobs easier. Because that's what I'm
here to do. Nothing. Nothing.
All right. Future Reports: We're looking at doing a combined payroll contribution report
and basically today, I know, you know it's hard, and I feel sorry for you when you're
trying to figure out what errors are out there in your payroll reports. You have to go to
a specific payroll report. You generate your error exception report. It says John Doe has
an error code 2005 wrong rate plan. But it doesn't give you anything else. So we are
creating...this is Brad's brilliant idea, we are going to create a new cognize report
that gives you all errors across all reports, so it's not specific to a specific report,
and it's going to give you a whole bunch more columns. It's going to give you the payroll
details you provided us. So when you generate this report and you see an error, you should
now be able to go, oh, I didn't mean to put $10.00/hr, I meant to put $100.00/hr, that's
what's causing my error. It should give you more up front information so you have to do
less research. So that's an enhancement.
One that's not on here, the Present Employers Statement report. I know schools have asked
for this one. It's not working for schools. It only works for public agencies. It doesn't
even work for state agencies. We're working to include that. So now it should actually
provide you the years of service the person received, as well as it's going to tell you
truthfully if they qualify for retirement or not because before, the yes/no indicator
was not working. So it's going to give you more information regarding the current status.
Right now, if you wanted to, you know, if you've got somebody calling you in. They're
like, "How much years of service, how much contributions do I have, am I even eligible
to retire?" You can't do it on a mass report. You actually have to do a person search and
look at it through the on-line screens. We're enhancing this cognize report to give you
more information. And we're currently testing that right now. So I'm hoping that that report
will also be available in March.
The caveat, though, is for schools and we couldn't do this, I'm sorry. If you look up
a person, we're not breaking out per appointment. We're not breaking out per district. Because
really if you look at the UID of the page right now, it's only giving you the full...it's
supposed to give you the contributions report for all employers, right? And the years of
service created for all employers. If I had to break it down by district, by appointment,
it would only show just your information and not all agencies and then it would make that
report really long and it would be one of those three-hour generations one. So all we're
doing now is we're giving the CalPERS ID, the person's name, date of birth, social security
number, all that stuff and it's going to be at the high level. How much years of service.
How much contributions reported.
Tracking Retiree Annuitant Hours: I kind of went over this a little bit. We had a cognize
report, but if you're not aware, we also, on the service history and transaction history
pages, so if you click on, I think Payroll Contribution Details on your left-hand side,
then the CalPERS link, and you can now see the total hours worked for retired annuitants.
So you don't even have to run a cognize report if you don't want to. We store it there. The
caveat, though is, is that is on there for everybody, not only retired annuitants, so
if you're one of those agencies that report total hours worked, not scheduled full-time
hours worked, but the actual total hours worked, for both your qualified and non-qualified
members, and for both your active and retiree, it's going to give you everything. So just
know if it looks a little inflated, it's probably because it's picking up the total hours you
reported when they were a member, as well as the total hours reported as a retiree.
If you're only giving us that data on it for retired annuitants, you don't have a problem.
Okay, so, just, if you report for everybody, just know it may look inflating and you have
to still go back and figure out what was reported as a normal member and what was reported as
a retired annuitant.
And then we found out from our Benefits Department is a lot of you, when you're doing...not a
lot of you, a couple of you, and probably no one in these schools, these are probable
public agencies that are doing this all the time, but when they're doing PPN transactions,
which is the equivalent of a prior period of adjustment transaction for retired annuitants,
they're not changing the total hours worked. So if I have 1000 hours in 40 hours work for
my retiree, and I am backing out 1000 hours, I see the negative 1000 dollars or earnings,
but I still have 40 hours total work. So when that finally posts, we show zero earnings,
80 hours work. So just know when you're doing those transactions, if you already have a
defaulted in your system, make sure that they're doing the negative total hours worked when
you're backing stuff out and not leaving it as a hard-coded default.
Managing Appointments: Maintain correct appointment status to prevent payroll errors. What I mean
by this is just make sure if you're in HR or your HR department does enrollments, that
they do them correctly. Because a lot of times from a payroll perspective, they'll get no
rate plan errors or some other type of errors and when I look at the appointment, it's because
they didn't give me the right details. They selected that this person is supposed to be
contributing 59 Survivor and they're not supposed to be. Any of those little glitches, if you
don't do it based on your contract, will not tie it to the specific rate plan and benefit
provisions that are associated to how you bargain with us and contract with us, so the
appointments will be corrupted. So just make sure when entering them, you enter them correctly.
The same thing is if you ever see a "No rate plan found," payroll error and you know for
a fact that the begin date and end date for that payroll record are after the enrollment
date or prior to a separation date, it means the appointment is probably corrupt somewhere.
HR, all they have to do is go in, correct event, look at the details, if there's no
changes needed, hit Save. It re-profiles them and it should get rid of those glitches.
Timely Separations: This was kind of brought up at the Ed Forum. Just make sure if you
have people who are separating, please do separations. I still see a lot of employers
who never process separations when a person leaves. And what you're doing is you're impacting
another agency, not a school, but you're impacting a public agency or state agency from getting
the right PEPRA determination, right. Because if you're appointment is active, we can't
do that six-month validation. That person is getting classic when they really shouldn't
be getting classis. So I'm begging, I'd get down on my knees, but half of you guys wouldn't
see me, please ask HR to do separations.
Roll Qualifying Employees By Position: I know none of you like this. I've always talked
about this, but really, if you don't enroll people by position at a district, creating
multiple appointments, it's only hurting the person when they go to retire. Brad and I
did some kind of validations. It doesn't really impact payroll. It doesn't impact anything
else. It impacts benefits. Because when they go do the final retirement calculation, they
have to do an outside manual job to figure out what all the pay rates are. It slows down
the process. It doesn't stop it, it just slows it down. So what they asked us, if you can,
please start to enroll people per position. I know it's problematic. Your districts are
going to have to get used to enrolling them and separating them. That means the county
office has to manage it, but what we're really asking is if you can, try to enforce that.
Can I answer questions at the very end? Thank you. So that's my little spiel about multiple
appointments.
Here. I am here today on behalf of Brad to tell you we heard your pain! We felt it! Last
time I was up here, I got a lot of swords coming my way. Retroactive salary adjustments.
We are looking into, by June, allowing you to process payroll with a pay rate that is
less than the highest posted pay rate, but higher than the lowest posted pay rate, which
means for your districts, who have multiple positions, you can now get these to go through.
The caveat is it still cannot be lower than the lowest earned period posted pay rate.
I don't understand why you would do that, but the retro salary adjustments have to be
higher than the highest posted pay rate per position. The problem with us relaxing these
business rules is, again, that the only way we can force you to create multiple appointments
by position is making this *** you. Well, I don't want to make things *** you, but
if we relax this, now you guys don't have an incentive to create multiple positions
and multiple appointments. So that's what I'm trying to stress; do it for benefits sake,
not for our sake. All right. So, but we are...if you have some cases right now, like I know
some of you are going through, because of the way California gives incentives and some
of your districts have a lot more money and they're giving retros, if you have a lot of
those outstanding right now and that's the only area you're trying to resolve in your
payroll report, you can contact Brad and I and we will work out a solution with you until
this gets fixed sometime in June or July. So if you are one of those employers that
have like 3000 outstanding RSA transaction errors and those are the only errors you have
left, you can contact us and we'll work with you until June. Is everybody happy about that
one? Thank you.
Correcting Payroll Errors: Correcting payroll errors. Search on posted payroll records,
there's a link on the left-hand side, many of you are aware of and you can search for
all the errors. These are the common error codes: Negative adjustments result and negative
balance. This generally happens when something doesn't match. And a lot of times it may occur
because how we convert data, but what I'm saying is the best way to avoid this is to
make sure the pay rate, pay rate type matches, begin and end date matches, and the tax deferred
status match, either employer paid or member paid and know that if you are adjusting payroll
records prior to July 1, 2011, the tax deferred status is probably in the employer paid bucket
because that's the way we converted it over. Appointment ID must be reported. This always
happens if you haven't enrolled the person yet or you're reporting payroll with a begin
date or end date outside the appointment parameters. I see it all the time. I don't know if there's
a way you can contact some of your software vendors to say "Only pull payroll," "Only
report" it so they don't cause these errors and have you to manually correct them, but
generally that's when those occur. The no rate plan found. Again, it's either if you're
reporting payroll after a person has already retired and there's no benefit provisions
for that period of time or the appointment wasn't created correctly. So those are the
three most common ones. If you ever have questions and you just can't resolve them, you can contact
Brad's team or myself. We can look at the Legacy data and figure out where the exact
match is not happening and help you post these pale transactions. Do I have time? Questions?
What? You're third. Ramona first.
Ramona: So just going back to when you said when we're enrolling employees, indicate their
position. I recently, within the last couple of months, attended a myCalPERS training session,
where we were told not to worry about that, that there was...that item was not being used,
so I was previously doing that and after this training session, stopped doing it because
of the information provided by the trainer, so I don't know if maybe that information
needs to be disseminated down to those who are conducting the trainings?
Tim: Good thing there's a training manager here in the room, so she heard that. But what
I would say is it's still not required. So technically, the training is correct. It's
not a required field, you don't have to give it to us. We're not making it required. And
we can't make it required because we know if we made it required, then I would be up
here in June sometime and having to explain why we made some of the requirements that
you don't like. I'm just saying for right now, that's practice and use this of the best
practice. Create multiple positions by...create multiple appointment by division, and that
way, and you don't have to store the appointment ID and report the appointment ID in your payroll
record; it would just...it just helps the retirement calculation. So if you can, do
it. If you don't, try to do it. Or look for a solution in the next five years to do it.
Ramona.
Ramona: On the Arrears Receivable cognize report, now it has all this detail, are we
able to run it anyway to just get the summary because my one page that listed the people
and their amount is now 86 pages.
Tim: No. So I would say just run it by person instead of doing a date range or run it by
receivable. Then once you get it into Excel, you can just sum up the columns. I kind of
do it one, you know at a high level and then you ask for more details and then I give you
and you ask me for high level. Frances.
Frances: Frances from LA County. The Arrears Receivable report is great. Our districts
love it. So we've sent out the invoices along with the report to identify the individuals
and they will start paying their invoices. So they're happy.
On the negative retro, we are going to have a situation with a couple of our districts
because of budget issues, where they're actually going to implement a negative retro, they're
cutting back salary rates. And so in a situation where an individual or individuals may have
multiple rates and they process the negative retro for one or both of those rates, the
result is it's going to be lower than the lowest rate. In that case, we're still going
to have to go in and do reversing entry, reverse original pay and bring it back in at the lower
amount. Right?
Tim: So, yeah, retro salary adjustments were made for the sole purpose of I got more money,
I'm giving everybody a raise. Here's the new pay rate, difference in earnings, difference
in contributions. We don't allow you to do negative transactions and if its' a negative
situation. I don't think we ever thought of...I mean it wasn't one of those concepts back
when we first launched it and it's so rare that the right way would be to back it out
and re-report it with a new rate.
The also thing I want to say is if your doing it by expanded time, so I know some of you
do it from like January to November as one record, the question was "How do we post those?"
Well, you can send it to us as one record when it processes and posts, we break it out
per how many pay periods there are. So if there are 11 pay periods, you'll actually,
when you go back to the report, you'll see 11 transactions. If there's any issue, where
it's like a penny off, we'll add the extra couple cents to the most current one. So we
try to average their earnings and contributions, unless we come on a situation where we're
penny off. That penny gets tied to the last one.
Regarding the Arrears Receivable report, I have a question and you guys just send me
an e-mail. I understand some of you have fiscally independent school districts. Or you are a
fiscally independent school district. The concept of Arrears Receivables were supposed
to go to the payroll data owner, in most cases, the county schools. The fiscally independent
school districts are supposed to get them also because they're the payroll data owners.
They're the ones that submit payroll to us and pay the receivables against those contributions.
I don't think the Arrears Receivables are being generated the way I had designed them
to be. So if you have cases where they're not going to your fiscally independent school
districts, let me know. For right now, the work around is, you're just going to have
get those invoices, send it to them, come out with some agreement where they give you
money to pay off your receivable and then I'm going to look to expedite this as an issue
and try to get it fixed between now and June. Because I know it's a pretty big case. Our
Financial Collections department keeps saying that they get calls all the time from districts
that can't pay it and they have to link to receivables and the county office isn't going
to pay it because they're not responsible for it. So what I'm saying is right now, we
can't, for whatever reason, get those districts to pay it, please just work with them until
I can get this fixed. All right? So send them the receivable, have them send you money and
then pay it off because it's on your account.
LA USD is a special case, yeah. They are different and so is San Diego Unified School District.
Some of them, like in San Jose, called me and there's some other ones that maybe just
had changed recently and those are the ones that are not getting the right receivables.
Q: Hi. Debbie from Fresno County Office of Ed. I had another question, but getting back
to what you were just saying, you wanted us to e-mail you. So the ones that report fiscally
that are independent, but all the billings are coming to me and going against my record,
you want an e-mail with their names?
Tim: I just need to log how many occurrences of this is happening to help support my escalation.
I can't change it, but if you want to tell me, "Tim, I got these three people and we
got 20 cases, and this is creating a hardship on my behalf," when I compile all those cases
and I submit it as an escalation issue, it further supports why I need to get this change
done now and not in 2015.
Debbie: Okay, I'll get that to you. I have another question because you were talking
about you're the one that, you know, deals with the file and how they're made. Excuse
me. We do file upload to send our report to you and when we send the file, it's clean
on our end, but when we get it to PERS, it ends up being rejected. And so when we check
on rejected, it gives such a broad definition, like there's dates, you know, beginning and
ending dates. Is there any way to get a report on who is causing it to kick out because what
we're finding is, like our last report, my IT person, you know, does a query. Well, we
have over 15,000 lines. And it's like finding a needle in a haystack. Fortunately, she was
able to contact somebody and they went through and were able, you know, try this person,
try this person. We finally located it, but it took two days to do it. So is there any
way to find out who it is on our end?
Tim: So, there's a level 1 right now that provides a CalPERS ID and I think it's when
payroll has been reported outside the appointment dates. That's a level 1, or when an earned
period record is being recorded with prior period dates, we give you the CalPERS ID.
For all other cases, we don't. And that's because of the way we process it. When it
fails, it fails on the first record. It doesn't go through the entire file and find everybody,
it fails on the first one. We've already identified this and we're trying to get this as a fix,
but it's a low priority fix on our behalf because there are so many other high priority
issues. Right now the work around, as soon as you get that level one, e-mail me. I have
a tool that I can find it like in seconds, tell you who the person is and then you can
go ahead and fix that person. So myself or Emily, whose on my staff, we have Altova XML
Spy is what we use. I have told employers to get some XML validation doc... you know,
like Altova XML Spy, because it's easy. You just save it in that file, you hit F8, it
goes through and tells you exactly who's not there.
The only ones we can't do that to is when your header contribution amounts is different
than your body. Because then it's just a sum of all contributions and I can't pinpoint
who that's for. So, unfortunately, for those cases, you'll have to go back to your IT,
but I don't know if you guys know this. I think I've shown it to a few. You can actually
open up Excel and then go find your file and open it up in Excel and it'll actually give
you everybody in columns so you can see your XML files in an Excel document, which may
help you kind of sum things up yourself. But for right now, don't call the center. Level
1 errors, just send to me because they come to me anyway, and either myself or Emily will
fix them right away.
Debbie: Great. Thank you.
Tim: It's Tim, T-i-m, underscore Herrback, H-e-r-r-b-a-c-k @ CalPERS dot Ca dot gov (tim_herrback@CalPERS.ca.gov.)
Who here doesn't know my e-mail? How much time do I have? I'm way over.
Meryl Fullilove: Tim? Actually Tim....
Tim: All right. I'll be here afterwards.
Meryl: Tim will be here afterwards to talk to any of our employers about questions they
may have specifically.
Q: I just had a comment. I wanted to say...This is Pam, Sac County Office of Ed...really like
that Arrears report. My only comment is, is it would be really nice to know when it's
out there because I get almost monthly contacts, sometimes e-mails, sometimes phone calls from
CalPERS when a bill is due. And we're trying to work with the district to find out what,
you know what time period the person is being charged or billed for and we were in that
situation, where it had actually gone to that warning collections notice and it turned out
that information was there, I just didn't, we didn't know it because we've been asking
and CalPERS was going to research it. And it's only a request.
Meryl: Thank you, Tim. If there are any questions that need to come into CalPERS, either that
we can answer during the meeting or after, please don't forget to use the CalPERS e-mail,
which is CalPERS_seac@CalPERS.ca.gov. But again, Tim, thanks for your presentation today.
We're going to go ahead and move on with the program. Next up is Julian Robinson. He's
from our Actuary Department. If you notice on your presentation, it says Kelly Stern.
Kelly was out ill today. And Julian has graciously agreed to come and present for her. So, Julian.
Julian: Good afternoon, everybody. I'm glad to be here. Unfortunately, Kelly's not well
and she asked me to fill in for her. We'll talk about the exciting subject of GASB 68.
I know, it's a great conversation stopper.
I'm sure you're aware of....the statement has been floating around for some time, GASB
started discussing the issue in the early 2000s and they put out a draft and it received
loads of comments and finally, in June of 2012, they published the two standards, GASB
67 and GASB 68.
Now GASB 67 is a standard, which is applicable to the pension plans and replaces the GASB
25 standard. And the GASB 68 standard, which applies to the employers and affects the employers
income statement and balance sheet replaces what was GASB 27.
Now of course, to complicate things, there are different effective dates for these two
standards. The GASB 67 standard is going to be effective for fiscal years beginning after
June 15, 2013 and it will reflect the June 30, 2014 CAFR and the GASB 68, which again
affects the employers, accounting and disclosures, is going to be effective for fiscal years
beginning after June 15, 2014 and for most employers, that will affect the June 30, 2015
CAFR.
Let's talk about a few of the highlights of what's happening with GASB 68. I guess the
major issue is kind of summarized in this first line, the accounting is no longer equal
to the funding. And we could spend a few hours just talking about this first line. I will
try and summarize it in a nutshell: Up until now, CalPERS has an essential rate, which
you contribute to the pension plan. And if you make your ASE contribution on time, then
you don't have any liability on the books. We've told you to make this contribution and
you've made the contribution and there's no under-funding put on the books. This has all
changed. GASB has defined a specific funding method to use to calculate the pension expense
and essentially it's saying now that you have to put a liability on your balance sheet if
the plan is un-funded. And if the plan is over-funded, you'll put..you'll show the surplus.
But there's now a separation between what CalPERS will tell you is your contribution
rate and what the pension expense will be showing on your balance sheet.
Part of the standard is requiring that the market value assets be used in disclosing
the liability or the unfunded liability on the balance sheet. And for those of you, who
read our reports, I know that they're great reading, great bedtime reading, puts me to
sleep very quickly. You'll see that we have, in fact, two asset measures, an actual value
of assets and a market value of assets. And we're actually phasing that out from our funding
valuations and part of the reason is because the GASB standard is requiring the use of
a market value of assets to show on the balance sheet.
And you know, the last point on this slide is, you know, like it's very important for
all of our agencies, and of course the schools in the districts, is that you'll show a proportional
share of the whole pools' liability on your balance sheet.
So everybody's been asking us, will CalPERS be providing the GASB information. And we
certainly plan on providing all of you with the information and it's, of course, a new
standard and we're working to get our systems up and running in order to provide these things.
One point is that in preparing for the implementation of GASB, the system is not able to use funds,
which are in the PERF. The PERF, you know, the assets we have accumulating to pay benefits
are...I mean, the PERF is a qualified trust and accounting expenses are not allowed to
be paid out of the trust. So we have to have separate funding for establishing GASB and
maintaining any activities related to GASB.
So, therefore, with respect to these GASB numbers and reports, we are, the board has
agreed to charge the agencies who request to have the GASB numbers produced. Again,
you know, this slide says it's not mandatory, which means it's not mandatory for you to
get the numbers from CalPERS. If you have some other actuary who's willing to provide
you the GASB numbers, then of course, you're free to engage them to get them to get you
the GASB numbers. But there will be a fee involved. I believe there's still a discussion
with respect to schools, where the schools will be required to pay this fee. The latest
I've heard for public agencies, the estimate was something around $1,000.00 to $1500.00
to produce the GASB disclosures per year. And more details will follow once we've made
further progress in getting ourselves ready for this roll-out.
So some of the issues involved our rewriting parts of the actuarial valuation system to
add a module, which is going to produce the GASB numbers and we're finding additional
stuff to assist in producing these things. But we realize that various agencies and schools
have different fiscal year ends and one of the complications is that the asset value
required in the disclosure match the measurement date and that's not necessarily June 30 for
everybody, so that's an issue which we are on the way of resolving.
That's kind of a general overview. If anybody has any questions about this, I'm happy to
take a few now before the program moves on.
Q: Melissa Anderson again from San Marino County Office of Ed. So, I can't remember
the details, but it seemed to me like the information from CalSTRS would be available to us much earlier than the information from
CalPERS. Is that true, even if you operate on a fee basis? Or is that even true?
Julian: I haven't heard about what schedule CalSTRS is on in providing information.
Melissa: Okay. So your intention then is not just to have the information available publicly,
on say your website or something, so that school district auditors can just access that
information on line? It's strictly going to be by request?
Julian: That's my understanding, yes.
Melissa: Okay. And do you know how much lead time will be required?
Julian: We're asking the interested agencies to contact us and essentially put their name
on a waiting list, so we have some sense of the level of interest in producing the GASB
68 numbers.
Melissa: Okay. Because we haven't heard anything in our... are you...I'm just wondering how
it's all going to work because we're trying to coordinate all of it, you know, for all
of our districts and our county.
Julian: Right. As with any major announcements, there will be a circulated, circular going
out when we have more specific....I'm sorry that things are particularly vague at this
point and...
Melissa: And are you intending on doing any kind of....I've got the microphone, I'm never
giving it up now....are you intending on doing...I almost said dog and pony shows, but road shows
or anything to educate our districts on the process and what's going on or what they can
expect on down the pike or is that something that you....
Julian: I'm not aware if we've got anything formal planned. Of course, I would encourage
everybody to speak to their auditors and coordinate with them and see what they're looking for.
But, I'll take that back as a suggestion.
Melissa: Yeah, just curious, just to kind of...we're trying to pull the whole thing
together and it's just, you know, we're there trying to be there for our districts and it's
just difficult to do because we've got this big piece from CalPERS and we got the big
piece from CalSTRS and it seems like they operate very differently and so we're just
trying to get all our little duckies in a row, so to speak.
Julian: Okay. I appreciate your questions. If there are no more questions, thank you
very much for your time. (1:00:46)
Meryl: Thank you, Julian, for that presentation. Coming up now is Donna Beaumont and she is
going to talk about the retirement planning fair that is coming up. Thank you, Donna.
Donna: Thank you. It's nice to see everybody. I haven't been to an SEAC meeting for a little
while, so it's really nice to see a lot of the familiar faces. My name is Donna Beaumont.
I'm not David Rubio, much....you know, your agenda says David Rubio, who is my boss. He
also is out ill today. I'm Donna Beaumont. I'm the manager of the External Education
Services area under the Customer Services in the Outreach Division and I'm here to talk
about retirement planning fairs.
In 1999, CalPERS began offering retirement planning fairs and they were really originally
designed to assist members in making well informed choices about their retirement benefits.
Since then, they've expanded quite a bit and you'll see in your packet, there's a flyer
that looks like this. CalPERS is hosting a retirement planning fair in Redding on February
28th and March 1st, so that's coming up real shortly, just in a couple of weeks. How many
of you here are from North of Sacramento? Excellent. So, I'll be talking about this
flyer a little bit more for those folks that have employees that are up in that Redding
area that might be interested in going to this fair.
But the...we haven't been in Redding since 2010 and in that particular fair, we had a
two-day event and we attracted just shy of 500 people to our fares. As of this morning,
for the Redding fair that we have coming up here in a couple of weeks, we had over 691
people registered for that fair. We do encourage our members to pre-register, but we also take
walk-ins, so if you have, all of the employers that are up North, if you could download this
flyer, I brought extras with me too that I leave on the table if you want to snag some
of them...but if you could download this flyer, which out on the CalPERS web page, under the
News For Employers section, you'll see the Retirement Planning Fare information and on
that page, there's a little box that says "Get the word out." If you would print some
of these and post them up and encourage your districts to post them in their offices, we
would really love to see school employers attending the retirement planning fair.
The offerings at the retirement planning fairs have been expanded significantly since they
first started. So there is information there, not just for people who are nearing retirement,
but also for your employees, who are earlier in their career, so that they can go and really
understand what their CalPERS benefits are. So it's a real good opportunity for them to
get that information.
At the fair, they'll be able to go to different breakout sessions that will provide them information
on retirement, health, deferred compensation and social security will be there conducting
presentations, and also a big exhibit hall, where several external vendors and representatives
from CalPERS will be there and provide opportunity for your employees to talk to the different
representatives from the different benefit programs that are going to be there.
I also want to take this opportunity to share with you some efforts under way to really
broaden the vision of these fairs. We're also going to be having some fairs in the May/June
time period that will be in Sacramento, Visalia, and Ontario and I'll let you know the dates
when I get to that part of my notes.
But the goal of these fairs is going to be to broaden the offerings at these events so
that we will have educational offerings for those people who are in the early stages of
their career, so they can really understand what their benefits are, to start planning
early. There's a...we find that there's a lot of earlier career members, who really
just don't have a good grasp of what their benefits truly are and, you know, information
that would allow them to plan better for their future.
We recognize the need to provide education and information for all our members, regardless
of which stage of their career they're in, so it's not just going to be for those people
who are, you know, three or five years away from retiring. It's going to be expanded to
those earlier career members.
The retirement planning fairs that will be coming up in May and June will have a new
name. We won't be calling them retirement planning fairs; we'll be giving them a new
name and that'll be announced probably next week at the board meeting, so look for information
and notices. We'll be sending out employer bulletins to you to let you know the information
regarding the new events that are going to be coming up. And again in May, May 9th and
10th, we'll be having one of these events at the Sacramento Convention Center. May 30th
and 31st, we'll be in the Visalia Convention Center, so in the central part of California.
And then June 6th and 7th, we'll be at the Ontario Convention Center for our employers
who are in southern California.
And we'd really love to see school employees attend these fairs. We have a fairly low attendance
from school employees, so we'd really love to see those numbers go up. So I encourage
and beseech you to print these poSTRS. The poster that we have, or the flyer, I should
say, out on the web right now does specifically appeal to the Redding fair, but we will be
providing you with similar flyers for the other events that I just mentioned.
And that's the information that I wanted to give to you today. Any questions?
Q:
Donna: The Ontario date is June 6th and 7th and it will be at the Ontario Convention Center.
You're welcome. Okay, thank you very much.
Meryl: Thank you, Donna. I'd next like to introduce Richard Neil. Richard is coming
to us to talk about an introduction of the New Employer Education Course 206 and his
presentation was navigating through your CalPERS retirement contract. Thank you, Richard.
Richard: Good afternoon, everyone. How is everybody this fabulous day? Awesome, love
to hear that. My name is Richard Neil and I'm a myCalPERS System Trainer with the Customer
Service and Outreach Division. My short presentation this afternoon will cover navigating through
your retirement contract in myCalPERS.
Much of what this presentation covers was featured in the first scenario of our course
206 webinar, which we broadcast this past November. A video of that webinar is available
on the CalPERS You Tube channel.
I'll start this presentation with telling you what myCalPERS system access you'll need
to navigate through your retirement contract. Then I'll demonstrate some of the key features
of navigating through your retirement contract in myCalPERS. I will follow up with showing
you how to view provisions in your retirement contract. Since the focus of this presentation
is navigation, I will not spend any time on details regarding any contract provision or
employer rates. Those types of questions are best directed to your CalPERS contract analyst
or actuary. There will be a few minutes for Q&A at the end of my presentation.
You system access administrator is the person who provides myCalPERS system access for your
users. In order to view your retirement contract, you'll need the Business Partner Limited access
role at the very least. This will allow you to view your contracts provisions and navigate
through your retirement contract.
For additional functionality relating to contracts, your system access administrator will have
to grant you the Business Partner Employer Maintenance and the Business Partner Retirement
Contracts access roles.
Now, let's go into myCalPERS and see how to navigate through your retirement contract.
I will not be using the real myCalPERS. All of the slides that you see are screenshots,
which we've taken from our training environment.
After logging into myCalPERS as a business partner and accepting the conditions of use,
you'll arrive at the home page, which is what you see on this screen. To access your retirement
contract, select the Profile global navigation tab. The Business Partner Summary page will
display next and that's on the next slide.
Before we start navigating through your retirement contract, I'm going to direct your attention
to the bottom of the page, but we'll have to scroll down to see that. And that's on
the next slide. Toward the bottom of the page, I have the Contract/Agreement section highlighted.
This school district has three items listed. These are: A Medicare only agreement (218),
A PEMHCA CalPERS health contract, and a PEMHCA non-CalPERS health contract.
Now, let's scroll back up to the top of the page. To begin navigating through your retirement
contract, select the Retirement Contract local navigation link. The Retirement Contract Summary
page will display next and that's on the next slide.
I'm going to take a few minutes now to review each section, one at a time, starting with
the Retirement Contract Information section. This section displays the retirement contract
number and it's status. We'll select the View Benefit Information link shortly to see member
benefits in more detail.
Now, let's review the next section, which is the Contract Event Summary section. And
that's on your next slide if you're looking through your little packet. The slides look
almost exactly the same. This section displays the status of either contract amendments and/or
valuation requests processes. This is more applicable to public agencies, rather than
schools since school benefits are set by statute. There are no additional line items in the
Contract Event Summary section to view.
Next, we'll review the Rate Summary section. And that's on your next page. This section
displays the current rates for an employer's various member categories. This school has
two levels of Miscellaneous, Classic and PEPRA, which is typical of schools. There are also
no additional line items to view in the Rate Summary section. If there were, we'd view
them by selecting the View More Actions link in the upper right hand corner of that section.
You're following along, this is now on your next page because it's almost exactly the
same. This time, I'm highlighting a different section. And that's the second line item within
the Rate Summary section. That's slide #11. I'm going to direct your attention to that
second line item. This is the Rate Summary For Miscellaneous PEPRA New Members.
For additional information, and this is on slide #12 in your handout, what you would
do is select the link for the Effective Employer Rate and that will give you additional details
on the employer rate list page.
Now, let's review the next section and that is the Employer Resolutions Written Labor
Agreement section, and that's on slide #13. What this section does is display prior resolutions
and/or new resolutions, which have been submitted. Some examples of these include EPMC, tax deferred
member contributions, tax deferred service credit purchases and two years of additional
service credit, also known as a "Golden Handshake."
In the upper right hand corner of this section, as well as many of the others is the View
More Actions or View More Actions and Records link. MyCalPERS generally only shows you the
first four line items in each section, not just here in the retirement contract pages,
but all through myCalPERS. Selecting that link in any section will open that section
in it's own page and that gives you the option to view all the line items, not just the first
four.
Now, let's review the Exclusions section, which is slide #14 of your handout. The Exclusions
section displays exclusions in your retirement contract. For this school, these are employees,
other than miscellaneous.
Now to review the last few sections of this page, we'll have to scroll down. So that takes
us to slide #15 in your handout. This is the same page as the previous slide. This time,
I have Exclusions highlighted at the top of the page. Now you can see the last three sections
and let's review those, starting with positions:
The Positions section, this is on slide #16, displays positions that employers maintain.
Another example of what you see here may be a "Golden Handshake." Employers may also view
Position Titles that you can select when you initially enter an employer into retirement
in myCalPERS. The position title is currently an optional feature of an employee's appointment
details. Also in this section, employers may view positions that are excluded from your
retirement contract.
On slide #17, I have what the position section looks like when the employer has entered in
position titles. Like most sections, you'll only see the first four line items.
Now, on slide #18, let's review the Special Provisions section. The Special Provisions
section displays a summary of special provisions covered in your retirement contract by effective
date of that special provision and the member category associated to that provision. Special
provisions are benefits that are not contracted for in a retirement contract, such as employer
paid member contributions, tax deferred member contributions and two years of additional
service credit, also known as the "Golden Handshake."
Two years of additional service credit is a contracted benefit. But the employer has
the option to provide this benefit by opening a window period, but is not required to do
so.
And now on slide #19, that brings us to the last section on this page, the Available Actions.
This mostly applies to public agencies. This is where they can submit valuation requests
and requests to amend your contract.
Now on slide #20 in your handout, we need to scroll back up the top of the page. And
this is where I direct your attention back to the Retirement Contract Information section
and the View Benefit Information link in the lower right hand corner of that section. This
is a new functionality in myCalPERS, which we featured in our course 206 webinar, myCalPERS
Retirement Contract Overview, which we broadcast this past November.
When you select the View Benefit Information link, the Benefits Summary page displays,
which is on the next slide, which is slide #21 in your handout. Please don't be deceived
that you see nothing here. What we need to do next is select the View More Actions link
in the upper right hand corner of this section to see what else is there and that is on the
next slide, slide #22.
That opens the Retirement Contract Benefits Summary page and within the Benefits Summary
section, you'll see the same two member categories that you saw on a previous slide; Classic
and PEPRA. Each of those has a different benefit formula; 2% at 55 for Classic and 2% at 62
for PEPRA.
Now on slide #23, I have one of those Miscellaneous links highlighted. To get additional details
about those benefit levels, you would select the link for that particular member category.
And for this, I'll select the link for the first Miscellaneous Classic Member category.
That opens up the Contract Provision Details page, which is what you see on slide #24 of
your handout. And I'll direct your attention to the Benefit Provision Details section,
which shows benefit provisions for this particular member category. If you want additional provision
details or possible restrictions, select a link for a particular benefit provision.
On slide #25, I have two of those line items highlighted and I'll go ahead and call those
out: The first one is one-year final compensation and the next one is the provision to convert
a newly sick leave to service credit.
On slide #26 in your handout, I'm highlighting the Benefit Provision Details section. What
you can do on this page is sort benefit provisions alphabetically by name and the provision category
or chronologically be effective date. You may also filter by the effective as of date
using that field and the display button. The screen will then refresh with benefits, which
took place on the entered date or before.
On slide #27, this gives me an opportunity to talk about a very important
myCalPERS navigation tip. And does everybody know what that is?
Never Use The Back Button! Yes. Don't ever do that. In myCalPERS, you go back by going
forward. To do that while navigating through the retirement contract, again, we'll select
the Retirement Contract local navigation link and on page 28, that takes us back to the
Retirement Contract Summary page. And that concludes the navigation portion of my presentation.
I'm going to take a moment right now to recap what I covered. That's slide #29. I started
with naming the required system access roles that you need to navigate through your retirement
contract. Then I covered basic contract navigation, and I followed up with how to view provisions
in your retirement contract.
There are many resources which are available to help you in using myCalPERS. You may submit
confidential inquiries in myCalPERS by using the Submit Inquiry feature.
You may e-mail the System Training Team directly via CalPERS_employer_communications@CalPERS.ca.gov
and we'll answer your training related questions. You may view our course 106 myCalPERS Retirement
Contract Overview webinar on the CalPERS You Tube channel. And as always, you can call
CalPERS at 888-CalPERS.
On behalf of the System Training Team, I'd like to thank you for attending our short
Navigating Through Your CalPERS Retirement Contract presentation. And I do have a couple
of minutes for any questions that you may have. Hi
Vina.
Vina: I just wanted to know since we had a contract number, let's say for Orange County,
what our one number is for all our schools, but if a couple of them offer the Golden Handshake,
but everybody different, are they going to still be able to see the Golden Handshake
information or only those districts will see who offered it? I know county can see everything.
Richard: So let me make sure that I understand what you're asking. So, is the Golden Handshake
offered at the district level or at the county office level?
Vina: When we do the resolution for our districts...
Richard: At the county office.
Vina: At the county office, but then it's offered by some districts. So I don't know
when they bring up their profile and contract, they're able to see the Golden Handshake information
or all Orange County districts?
Richard: That is a great question, Vina, and I thank you for asking that and what I'm going
to have to do with that one, is I'll have to meet with you off-line and I'll get you
an answer to that.
Vina: Okay. And one other thing. On the Available Actions, when it says System Transfer Out,
what does that mean?
Richard: What slide is that on, Vina, so that everybody has....
Vina: I don't see a number here on your slides.
Richard: Okay, it looks like there's one on slide #15. Actually the one's that highlighted
would be slide #19.
Vina: I don't see the numbers, but Available Actions, Submit Valuation Request...
Richard: I see the one that you are pointing to.
Vina: What does that mean? System Transfer...
Richard: Since I'm not a contract specialist, I would best refer that question to one of
our contract analysts, so what I will do is I will find that answer for you and I will
get back to you as soon as I can.
Vina: Okay. Just curious. Thank you for the very good presentation.
Richard: Thank you for asking, and I think we have time for one more question. Yes, there's
one question in the back.
Q: Hi. This is Carol from Butte College. We have both our school contract and we also
have safety, so that's under a separate... as a government agency, I believe.
Richard: I believe that Safety would be under a separate contract.
Carol: And if we're interested, they've just recently negotiated a new provision for bilingual
stipend payment, Special Comp. We need to upload that and I'm getting an error message
on my file, so would I go to that bottom section and request an amendment to contract. And
is there information on your webinar 206 to show me how to do that?
Richard: In 206, we did not cover that. But, again, what I would do for that one is I would
put you in touch with our contract unit because they are the ones that could best walk you
through that process and answer all those questions. Can I please get your name at the
end of this. When we go on break, I'll come and follow up with you personally. So thank
you, all.
Meryl: Thank you, Richard. What we're going to go ahead and do now is take a 10-minute
break and we'll be back again at 10 after, and we'll see you all then. Thank you.
Emily DeFlores: Good afternoon, I'm back. Actually, I have the great pleasure of introducing
one of my staff, Andrew Harris and he is going to actually be giving the Independent Contractor
information and then through the Q&A, both of probably will be answering. But it's my
pleasure to bring on Andrew Harris.
Andrew: Thank you. Good afternoon. Today, I'll be talking about independent contractors
and the CalPERS review process. We typically don't see too many of these from school employers,
but in the even that you do, here is the CalPERS review process and some of the things we look
at:
So, first, it's important to know what affects these determinations have on your workers.
This is basically why it's important. These determinations could affect CalPERS membership.
It could affect the worker's ability to purchase service credit. Also, it could affect their
employment after retirement. If the person is a CalPERS retiree, they could be subject
to the working after retirement rules.
So, what does CalPERS look to to make these determinations? We look to what is called
the Common Law Control Test. The Common Law Control Test is a critical determination of
whether the employee is a common law employee of a CalPERS employer. It helps us determine
which employer is in control and who is an employee. Ultimately, if an employer has the
authority to exercise complete control, whether or not that right is exercised with all respect
to details, an employer-employee relationship exists.
The most important court case affecting membership for CalPERS purposes was a case in 2004. It
was the Metropolitan Water District of southern California versus the Superior Court of Los
Angeles, known as the Cardio Case; it was named after one of the plaintiffs. And in
this case, they concluded that the common law employment test does apply under the PERL.
So we can look to that to determine who has control.
So now, we get our information for a variety of areas, but here is a general list of things
CalPERS looks to to generate this review:
We go out to both the agency and the worker and we get supporting documentation regarding
their employment, such as the service agreements, organizational charts, job duty statements,
payroll information, resolutions, charters, bi-laws, board meeting minutes, which are
probably more applicable to your agency and we develop something called an Employment
Relationship Questionnaire. And this is where we ask questions regarding the type of position
and the employment the worker had at the agency.
For your convenience, we've created a checklist for you and it is a more comprehensive list.
It's located in your packet with the things we've provided. And you'll notice on the checklist,
the first four items are the same as the previous slide. Just in the payroll information section,
there are some more specific things we look for. What we call the Mem 1344 is something
we provide, so some of you may be familiar with this form and you can use that as well.
With this information, it's important to note that what we look for, the time period we
look for is the time they worked as an independent contractor because the situation may have
changed since the time they did this employment. They may be an employee now or they may not
work for the agency anymore, but we need the information at the time period they were designated
an independent contractor.
Going down the list again, we have personnel information. If they work at a personnel file,
any correspondences that you may have had between the two parties, a salary schedule
if that existed, resolution, again board meeting minutes, city charters or bi-laws if that's
applicable, supporting letters that you or the worker may want to provide. Again, the
employment questionnaire. And other supporting information or documents that you'd like to
provide for CalPERS review.
So, in summing up, CalPERS looks to the Common Law Control Test to determine which entity
is the employer and who is an employee. The independent contractors are responsible for
only the end product and employees are subject to control over how the job is done. So that
concludes my independent contractor discussion. If you have any questions, I'll be glad to
answer any. I'll do my best. Yes ma'am.
Q: Frances Miroz at LA County Office of Education. If a district employee, someone who is an
independent contractor, and they complete this checklist and they send all the documentation
to CalPERS....In the meantime, this person is working and being compensated as an independent
contractor. If CalPERS determines that, no they do not meet the independent contractor
stipulations, that they then determine that this person is actually subject to reporting
payroll and collecting contributions, is the employer responsible for those contributions
if that person is no longer employed?
Andrew: I believe so, yes. If we determine that the person is, in fact, an employee,
you would, if they're still working for you, you would report them going forward and then
we would do an arrears adjustment for the prior period that they did do the work.
Frances: Okay, would the arrears be the 20283 or just the mandatory arrears.
Andrew: I believe it depends. Emily will have a better answer for you on that one.
Emily: You know my answer; case-by-case basis. We have to look at each situation individually.
We can't just blanket 20283, it doesn't apply. So we just need to look at the situation,
the documentation to determine should 20283 apply or not.
Frances: Okay, so in order to avoid a potential liability, the employer should really submit
this documentation in advance of employing this person to determine whether or not they
should collect contributions from that person or not?
Emily: Yes.
Andrew: When you do submit documents, the typical turnaround time for review is 120
days. So just so that you know it, because the data is complex, so just in case you were
wondering.
Emily: And one of the reasons for the 120 days is many times, we get documentation and
as we read through that documentation, we need additional documentation. And when we
ask for that documentation, we're not getting that response, so as long as you're responsive,
that should drop down the time that we need to look at it, but that's what we're encountering.
When we send out information to the employers, a lot of employers don't respond quickly.
This happens in the situation of the arrears calculations, when we make our determination
and we send out the 30-day letter, "Hey, we made this determination. Employer, this person
should have been brought in at a certain time. Tell us within the next 30 days if you don't
agree with this." Take those letters seriously because once we send out that letter and that
30-day has lapsed, we will then give it to the Service Credit costing area. They will
calculate the arrears due. It's really hard to undo that. So, you know, we're asking you
to be more responsive to our inquiries when we need that additional information. Thank
you.
Meryl: Thank you, Emily and Andrew. Thank you. At this time, we're about 10 minutes
early, which is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. We'd like to open the floor up for
an open forum or discussion. Is there anything that anyone needs a clarification on out of
any of the presentations today or anything you want to bring to our attention, we're
more than welcome to listen.
Frances: Frances from LA County. At this morning's session with CalSTRS for items on the next
agenda, it was brought up to maybe discuss the right of election and as it relates to
bringing an employee back to employment, either as a refunded person or a retiree. Which...how
does the rules apply if they retired from one system and they took an election and they're
coming back as a retiree, how are they treated? And I believe the question in the back was
if they refunded and they had taken an election and refunded and they come back to work, how
are they treated? So maybe CalPERS, from their point of view, can have that on the agenda
for next meeting.
Meryl: Most definitely. That's a very good topic and we'll be sure to add that, put that
on our agenda topics. Is there anything else anyone would like to discuss? Or needs clarification
on any of the presentations today or just bring up.
Vina: I just wanted to suggest that STRS does that, like whatever. I know we should do many
letters, so it's not possible to cover all between this meeting and next meeting, but
if there are some school, related to school employers, like this one is for section 415
billing. If you can kind of enclose that in the handout and have somebody here in case
there are questions regarding those letters, that we receive lots of bulletins.
Linda: Okay, so to clarify. So, any handouts, any CalPERS documents that are sent out in
between the meetings, you would like a copy in the folder and then...
Vina: I mean, not every single, not like you have a board meeting...
¬ Linda: The circular letters or important documents...
Vina: Like important news that applies to
Linda: ...and then have the person here to speak on it.
Vina: ...answer if there is a question if possible.
Linda: Sure. We'll look at that. Absolutely.
Vina: Thank you.
Q: This is Carol from Butte. A couple. Number one, I was going to post something to Tim,
so maybe he can share with the rest of us. It had to do with the log-in enhancement that's
coming out. I had a question about the portion of resetting passwords, if that would replace
what the system access administrators do now when their employees forget their passwords
or need to have them reset. And I had a second question too.
Tim: So the first one. It doesn't replace the having the need for a system administrator
because some agencies are so small, they only have one employee. So that person, I mean,
you know they have to be able to have another mechanism to reset their password because
there's nobody else there. So it's just giving you more venues or opportunities to reset
your passwords without having to go to a system administrator. Right now, if you log in, there
should be a little link on the very bottom of your user ID and password. It says forgot
password. And then you answer your challenge questions and if you answer all five of them
correctly, it then has you create a new password. What the enhancements are is basically other
ways. So you don't have to choose forgot password, you can just say give me a one-time reset
and it sends you a text message of your new password. So you don't even have to answer
your challenge questions. That's all the enhancements do and it is giving you multiple ways to reset
it, in addition to your system administrator. Because I'm assuming if you have 500 people
underneath of you, you don't want to be the only person that has to reset passwords all
day. Because I'm sure you have other things to do than reset passwords. So all it's doing
is just giving more options. You had two questions. What's your other question?
Carol: Second question, and this may be for when you're calling for draft agenda items
or if someone can speak to it. The circular letter that just came out, speaking about
employer response dialogues. Can somebody tell us what that is and if we should get
information about it?
Tim: I don't have anything. I'll have to get back to you on that one.
Melissa: I agree with Vina. It'd be really great to see, you know sometimes we don't
get the circulars for one reason or another, we might miss one or whatever, but that would
really be helpful to be able to talk about those more recent thin... you know, I know
we develop the agenda now for three months on down the road, but it would be nice to
talk about the real current issues when we get here and have someone available to talk
about that. That'd be fabulous.
Linda: Yeah, absolutely. We'll have those in your folders going forward, so circular
letters.
Melissa: That's really great. And then the other question I have, or I'm just wondering
if you could add to the next agenda or maybe you could speak to it now and that is. You
know, again, I don't know if you were here or not, but I asked STRS the same question.
You know, we need to advise districts on things like the rates and those kinds of things and
I realize some things aren't set yet, but is anyone talking about where we're going
with the rates and what we anticipate they might be for the upcoming fiscal year 14/15
and how it might be going forward into the future in the multi-years?
Linda: So presently, there is no one is the room who can speak to rates at this point.
So we can get back to you on that or, and we'll put it on the agenda also. Absolutely.
Melissa: Okay, thanks so much.
Q: Debbie from Fresno County Office of Ed. Earlier, you had mentioned the e-mail address
specific to the School Employer Advisory Committee. Could you repeat that, please?
Meryl: Sure, it's CalPERS_seac, which stands for School Employer Advisory Committee, @ CalPERS.ca.gov.
We actually updated that, the old e-mail address, that I'm sure a lot of you may be familiar
with, which was the school_employer_advisory_employer_@CalPERS.ca.gov, so we updated it just to CalPERS¬_seac@CalPERS.ca.gov.
I think so.
So at this time, we're at that time where we, you know, we've already received a couple
of really good agenda items for May and some things that we can start maybe working on
before May, but are there any additional items that you'd like to give us for the May 7th
agenda at this time? Yes, ma'am, we'll get you on mic.
Q: Hi. I'm Debbie from Los Rios and I'd like to get some additional information on how
to handle these arrears reports. I hope that the report that's going to be available will
answer some questions, but if we still dispute it or if there's still problems or questions,
how do we go about handling the situation? Multiple phone calls and follow-ups so far
haven't seemed to come to any conclusion.
Tim: Hello. For the arrears, there's a process. And so I guess what I would be looking for
is are you talking about how to identify who it's for and then what was used in the calculations
or are you wanting to know the actual process, which at a very high level, from what I understand
and... give me the hook if I say anything wrong here, but, you know, generally we get
arrears cases when somebody goes to buy service prior to membership or they're looking for
something, right? And then when our service credit team is looking at all the information,
they see maybe the person did qualify, so they send something over to our membership
for determination, at which time a determination is made and you get notified that a determination
is made. And from what I understand, you're supposed to have 30 days. From that, it goes
down to Costing. The calculations are made. The system kicks out a receivable and your
primary payroll person, so whoever is listed as your primary payroll contact, should get
a an e-mail notice and the receivable is generated. And then, unfortunately, because the way we
generate from PeopleSoft, the invoice can't include all the details, which is why we created
the cognize report. Now the cognize report is supposed to give you back everything you
gave us to help us do the calculations. If you want to know that whole process and how
to fight an arrears case or if you have any...you don't agree with the determination, that would
be something that Emily's team can provide.
If you're not saying "I dispute the determinations; I just need to know more about what was made,"
I can then go over that from a systems perspective. So what would you like?
Debbie: I'm looking for how to handle the situation. I already know who it's for. I
got the invoice. I cannot calculate the amount that we're being charged, so hopefully now
this new report that you said, will give me the breakdown of how you calculated that invoice.
Am I correct there?
Tim: Yes.
Debbie: Okay, so hopefully for this particular person, I'll be able to answer those questions.
But if I still can't calculate, or I dispute the way it was calculated, where do I go from
there?
Tim: If you dispute the information, so, what's used in calculations is basically the payroll
details you provide us. There's a form that you fill out and you give us all the payroll
details and Service Credit goes in and takes that, enters it into the system. The system
sums up all the earnings, applies the member contribution rate that was there and the current
employer rate at the time the calculation goes through to give you the final arrears
costing. If it's 20283, you get both the member and employer side. If it's mandatory, you
only have the employer side.
So if you're looking at the arrears report, you should now see every line item, the pay
rate, the pay rate type, the earnings used, the member contribution rate and the employer
contribution rate used in the calculation. Just know if you have two arrears receivables
for the same person, right now, the report is showing you all the details under both
and you're just going to kind of have to separate it and we can work with you on that, but...that's
what our cognize report is to give you what was used for the final calculation. If after
that's all said and done, you're like somebody transposed the number, you entered the wrong
earnings, you entered the wrong rate, right, or we dispute the member contribution rate
because maybe this person is supposed to be a different classification than what you used,
then that would generally have to go through the call center and we would have to get our
service credit purchase unit involved to have them re-look at it and maybe it was a clerical
error. But, I mean, that would have to be after you looked at it and confirmed what
was used.
Debbie: Okay, because I've tried calculating it based on all the information that I had
and I didn't come anywhere near what I was being invoiced. So hopefully this report will
clarify that.
But I've got another situation, where I have an employee took a withdrawal of all of her
deductions, her contributions and it was reversed and now I'm being charged for it a second
time and it's been outstanding for several months now. And there's notes and notes, like
crazy, and everybody I talk to, said there's all kinds of notes on it and somebody will
call me back and it keeps supposedly going up the ladder, but I have yet to get a response
from anyone. So I'm not quite sure how to handle it. I haven't paid it because I feel
it's already been paid and it should not have been reversed to begin with because she's
already gotten a refund of all her disbursements.
Emily: So why don't we take that off-line. Let me get your name and number and the individual
involved and I'll go back and see who and what needs to be done.
Debbie: Okay. Thank you.
Q: Hi. Debbie from Fresno County Office of Ed. As an agenda item for the May meeting,
can we request that Tim come back and give us some updates as to where we are now, because
it's been very good information, Tim. I mean, you told us about things that are going to
be happening in March and some things that are going to be happening in June and July.
We would just like to know.
Linda: Yeah, we're not going to be able to live with Tim now, so, no...sure, we will
have Tim.
Debbie: Because it's nice to have somebody here that we can ask that knows, instead of
us having to go through 10 different people.
Linda: No, we will. We will. We'll have Tim here for you.
Tim: All right. So I'm going to say the same thing that I said last time, right? Is that
if you guys have specific topics that you want me to talk about. Because I mean I throw
these things together at the last minute and hope it's relevant to what you want. And normally,
I get some people's feedbacks because they're the ones that generally e-mail me every day
and tell me what they want, so then, I build these presentations. But I also don't want
to take away from the purpose of this meeting, which is for all the different program areas
that share relevant information just for you guys to chat with me. So maybe it comes down
to, you know, this is going to be a discussion that Linda may have to have to say, you know,
is this the right venue for me to work with you guys or should we create another venue,
where you guys just come and I do a presentation all day on myCalPERS and I get all your problems.
Is there another better venue? I don't mind doing this, but I don't want to take away
from what this day's all about either. So, if you can, for right now, you can e-mail
an agenda item. Just send me what you want and I'll present on it and hopefully keep
it amongst my 20 minutes, but if it gets too much, then maybe we can look at another way
of *** these kinds of events.
Linda: He can be a key note during lunch.
Tim: A couple of things. One, Brad and I, from a payroll perspective, and Emily and
I are going to start working closer together. When we have system enhancements that we know
are going to impact you, because I'm pretty much your liaison between you, myCalPERS,
I'm your voice when there's issues coming on right? So we're going to start working
closer together to make sure we get this information out to you sooner. I'm still trying to figure
out the best way to do it, posting on our web, from what I'm told, a lot of you don't
go to the Employers New section of myCalPERS. I don't know if that's it. I can't post things
on the home page. So I am trying to figure out if I can get the information out to you
more relevantly.
And then the other thing is, system performance, I know a lot of you have contacted me about
it's so slow. I need you to please keep sending me those e-mails regarding system performance.
Are you getting kicked out, logged out, is it taking a half hour for you to find somebody
and that's all you tried to do. So if you have my e-mail address and you have these,
please send those to me because I'm trying to make them better. Okay, but I am going
to try to push out more information timely to you on our web pages.
Meryl: Thank you, Tim. So are there any more agenda items for May or any more questions?
So none? We are adjourned. Thank you all very much. See you in May.