Purpose

To describe a new field in PayServ to be used by New York State’s Statewide Financial System (SFS).

Affected Employees

All Employees

Effective Date(s)

Immediately

Background

New York State is in the process of developing a new Statewide Financial System (SFS). As part of this effort, PayServ will be sending employee name, address and direct deposit account number to SFS to assist in processing employee expenses such as travel. A new employee identifier has been created that will not be equal to the employee Social Security number. This new field will enable SFS to use employee information while protecting employee privacy.

The SFS will not be available for employee expenses until October, 2011. More information about how PayServ employee data will be used in the SFS will be discussed in future Payroll Bulletins.  For more information about the Statewide Financial System go to http://www.sfs.ny.gov/.

OSC Actions

OSC has established an alternate employee identifier in PayServ that is not equal to the Social Security number for future use by SFS. The field name is SFS Alternate ID and the path to locate it is Workforce Administration > Modify a Person>Biographical History.

OSC has populated this field for all employees (active or inactive). OSC will also modify PayServ so that this field will be automatically populated for each newly hired employee. It will begin with the letter N followed by eight numeric values. Once a number has been assigned, it will remain part of the employee’s record in PayServ.

The SFS Alternate ID will be assigned at the employee level and be unique to the employee. If an employee has multiple job records, the SFS Alternate ID will be the same for all jobs. If an employee leaves state service, the SFS Alternate ID will not be used again for another employee. If the employee then returns to state service, the same SFS Alternate ID will continue to be used for that employee.

The SFS Alternate ID will not be used for any Payroll processing at this time and will not be available for update by the agencies. It is anticipated that PayServ will discontinue using the Social Security Number as the employee identifier at some time in the future.

Agency Actions

None.