For the January 10th employee paychecks, HRMS mistakenly applied the 2022 Paid Family Medical Leave (PFML) rates instead of the 2023 rates. This resulted in an under collection of approximately $5 or less per employee. HRMS auto corrected itself for the January 25th paychecks by collecting the correct 2023 premium of the amount that was missed on the January 10th paycheck. However, PFML has specific language in law and per WAC 192-510-065, and employers are not allowed to collect the difference from a future paycheck. Once this was discovered, OFM could not adjust the system programming in time to stop the auto corrected collection.
What’s the impact to employees?
Ultimately, this will have no adverse fiscal impact to employees, as detailed in the following timeline:
January 25th Paycheck
Employees may have noticed a larger PFML premium deduction on their January 25th paycheck as the 2023 rates processed retroactively for pay period 1/2023. This difference will be refunded to employees.
February 10th Paycheck
The appropriate 2023 PFML rate deduction will occur on their February 10th paycheck along with a PFML Refund. The refund amount will be returned to employees through an additional line item visible on the Earnings Statement called 3103 PFML Refund within the Allowances section.
February 24th Paycheck
The February 24th paycheck will return to normal, collect 2023 PFML rates, and no additional PFML processing will occur.
What’s the plan going forward?
1. To address the immediate issue, HRMS has been updated with a new Wage Type to process this one-time Paid Family Medical Leave employee refund:
WT Name
WT Number
Function
PFML Refund
3103
OFM will use wage type 3103 in the Additional Payments (0015) infotype via Winshuttle to refund a portion of PFML premiums for Period 1/2023.
The new wage type will process through each employee’s cost distribution, which will increase the employer expenditure charges for PFML (sub object BK).
2. OFM will place the new wage type into production the morning of Thursday, February 2nd. Once the new wage type is in HRMS, the HRMS technical team will upload refund amounts for each employee into the Additional Payments (0015) infotype using Winshuttle. There is no agency action required and we ask that agencies do not use Wage Type 3103.
3. Going forward, OFM has fixed the issue in HRMS, and this will not occur in future pay periods nor in future PFML rate increases.
