Understanding Pension Payee Tracking with Human Resources

Human Resources tracks essential data about your employees. It tracks all kinds of employee information to help you manage everything from competencies to career planning. The most basic information is stored in two records: personal data and job data. You use these records to track your pension payees, including both employees (retirees) and non-employees (beneficiaries and QDRO alternate payees).

Very few changes are required to establish a retiree personal data record that is based on an employee record. One field, person type, is changed. Beneficiaries and QDRO alternate payees, on the other hand, may not have a personal data record until you create one.

Although payee data is available on the PeopleSoft HR: Administer Workforce pages, Pension Administration also provides separate personal data and job data pages for pension payees (the Create Payee and Identify Payment-Related Info pages). Although the payee pages display fewer fields than their counterparts in Administer Workforce, they reference the same records. This means that the payee personal data and job data records have exactly the same fields as the employee personal data and job data records.

If fields have default values, the payee records use those defaults, even though you do not see the fields. Conversely, if a field is required, you must provide a value even if the information does not apply to payee records (for example, standard hours).

You can use PeopleSoft security trees to set up security, based on an employee's department in the job record. When you set up a retiree job record, you enter a department code. Depending on your organization's security requirements, this may be one department (or more) just for pension payees or the same department that housed the person as an employee. If your organization uses a separate department for payees, you can use security trees to prevent certain users from accessing payee data.

PeopleSoft permission list security, on the other hand, enables you to restrict users from accessing certain pages. However, because payee records are really the same as employee records, you cannot use permission list security to prevent users from accessing payee records; you can only prevent them from accessing only payee-specific pages.

Personal data includes a payee's name and address, as well as demographic information, such as birth date, sex, and marital status. This is data that does not change based on a person's role in the organization. Most importantly, the personal data record is where you assign people their employee IDs, which are their permanent and unique identifiers.

When you use Human Resources to track retired employees, you continue to use the same personal data record. This makes sense because the data does not change just because an employee retires. This means that you track retirees using the same employee IDs they had as employees.

When you set up beneficiaries and QDRO alternate payees, an employee ID may not exist. In this case, you have to create a personal data record as part of the process of setting up the payee.

Job data describes an employee's role in the organization. In addition to the actual job code, the job record contains information on the employee's company, department, location, salary, benefit program, and other similar information. The job record is effective-dated so that you can track this information over time. Employees can even have multiple concurrent jobs for the same company. In this case, the employee is said to have multiple job records. For example, if Barbara is simultaneously a professor of engineering and dean of the engineering school, she has two jobs and two job records. PeopleSoft uses the Rcd# (record number or job number) field to identify the separate jobs.

When you use Human Resources to track pension payees—that is retirees, beneficiaries, and QDRO alternate payees—you give a payee a "job" as a retiree. The retiree job is a concurrent job. For example, if Earl retires from his job assembling widgets, he has two job records: one as a widget assembler, another as a retiree.