Excess Agency Contributions to the Thrift Savings Plan
Highlights
This letter summarizes the issue of overpayments to the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and several other federal agencies that resulted from payroll processing errors at the National Finance Center (NFC), and the resulting actions NFC took to address the issue. In the course of testing payroll transactions as part of our audit of the IRS's fiscal years 2003 and 2002 financial statements we found that for some employees of IRS, NFC incorrectly computed agency mandatory contributions to TSP of 2 percent on the employees' base pay instead of the statutorily required 1 percent. We also found that certain employees of other agencies had also been affected, and that these excess contributions had occurred from September 1999 through September 2003. As a result, IRS and these other agencies made contributions to TSP that exceeded statutory requirements for those employees during this period.
Recommendations
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| National Finance Center | NFC should take actions to determine the magnitude of the overpayments. |
Closed – Implemented
NFC determined that the amount of overpayments was $126,136 paid to 203 employees.
|
| National Finance Center | NFC should take actions to correct the affected TSP accounts. |
Closed – Implemented
In accordance with applicable law, NFC (1) returned $20,873 to federal agencies, (2) made $98,674 available to the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board to use in operations, and (3) forfeited $6,589 to the recipient employee accounts.
|
| National Finance Center | NFC should take actions to implement procedures to prevent or detect such errors in the future. |
Closed – Implemented
NFC implemented procedures to detect duplicate TSP r3cords that were the cause of these overpayments.
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