Report 2012-603 Recommendation 6 Responses

Report 2012-603: High Risk Update: State Agencies Credited Their Employees With Millions of Dollars Worth of Unearned Leave (Release Date: August 2014)

Recommendation #6 To: Controller's Office, State

To improve the accuracy of information in the leave accounting system and to ensure that agencies do not improperly credit employees with leave in the future, the state controller should, using criteria provided by CalHR, develop monthly exception reports that identify transactions in the leave accounting system that are inconsistent with the guidelines established in state law and collective bargaining agreements, such as instances in which state employees receive too many personal holidays or too much holiday credit. By June 2015 begin providing each state agency's human resources management with the transactions identified in the exception reports for review and correction as necessary.

Annual Follow-Up Agency Response From October 2016

Since our last report, the SCO's CLAS Unit has (1) modified the existing High CTO, Holiday Credit, and Excess Hours report to include high earned amounts posted to any leave benefit, and renamed it as the Earned Benefit Audit Report; (2) created and released the new Retroactive Earned Benefit Audit Report, which includes data between February 2011 and December 2015; (3) created and released the Annual Leave and Sick Leave Report, which includes retroactive data, to assist departments in correcting erroneous Annual Leave and Sick Leave accruals; and (4) created a new Personal Holiday Audit Report, which identifies Personal Holidays posted for ineligible employees, and instances where both Personal Holiday and Holiday Credit are posted in the same leave period. Eliminating the transaction used to post duplicate Holiday Credit "earn" transactions will be reported in response #4 with the status of other CLAS system updates. While the SCO will continue to monitor and modify our reports to ensure they provide valuable information, we consider this recommendation fully implemented.

California State Auditor's Assessment of Annual Follow-Up Status: Fully Implemented

1-Year Agency Response

We completed three of four planned reports and have begun developing additional reports to ensure leave records are accurate. First, in May, per CalHR's request, we reduced the hours in the existing High CTO, Holiday Credit, or Excess Hours Report from 100 hours to 80 hours for CTO, 30 hours for Holiday Credit, and 8 hours for Excess. We plan to further refine this monthly report by including errors from previous months until they are corrected; the current report includes transactions for the prior leave period only. Second, as requested by CalHR, the SCO made the Leave Activity and Balance (LAB) Report available for download from ViewDirect to Excel. Third, an exception report has been created to locate when both Annual Leave and Sick Leave accruals are received, and will be made available to departments by Fall 2015. We are continuing to develop a report to identify instances in which employees are credited with Holiday Credit in a leave period that has no holidays (i.e., April, June, August, and October); this report will be available by Fall 2015.

In addition to exception reports, the SCO plans to eliminate the transaction that is currently used to post duplicate Holiday Credit "earn" transactions. Also we are developing separate tracking for employees who work on a holiday. These system updates will be done instead of an exception report, which will bring more clarity to the reason hours are being posted. This effort will be completed by April 2016.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 1-Year Status: Partially Implemented

6-Month Agency Response

We are making good progress on this recommendation and are working to develop several new exception reports. CalHR has requested reports to identify when a record has more than one earn transaction for a leave type (such as when there is both a Holiday Credit earn as well as a earn in lieu of Saturday Holiday in the same leave period), when a record has a Holiday Credit earn transaction in a leave period that doesn't have any holidays (such as April, June, August, and October), and when a record has an inappropriate concurrent accrual for Annual Leave and Sick Leave. We are currently creating the criteria for these reports, and are on track to have them available to departments by June 2015. Also, CalHR has provided updated criteria to improve the value of two previously implemented reports. They have requested that we reduce the hours in the existing High CTO, Holiday Credit, or Excess Hours Report from 100 hours to: 80 hours for CTO, 30 hours for Holiday Credit, and 8 hours for Excess. We have validated that the criteria is appropriate and are working to update the report and put it into production by June 2015. They also requested that we modify the existing Leave Activity and Balance (LAB) Report to allow download capabilities from ViewDirect to Excel. We are currently testing a new application that will accomplish this, and are on track to make it available to departments by June 2015.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Partially Implemented

60-Day Agency Response

We have already created several monthly exception reports that we share with agency human resources management for review and correction as necessary. We are currently analyzing the feasibility and value of other potential exception reports, beginning with reports of extra personal holidays and excessive holiday credit. At this time, we expect to be able to meet the June 2015 deadline for this recommendation.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: No Action Taken

The State Controller's Office's response references exception reports that we discuss on page 27 of our report. The State Controller has not developed any new exception reports in response to our recommendation.

All Recommendations in 2012-603

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.