About Intra-Governmental Payment and Collection

The US Federal government uses Intra-Governmental Payment and Collection (IPAC) to process payments (as a buyer) and collections (as a seller) for transactions between federal agencies.

The funds from the transactions stay within the Treasury and are transferred electronically as debits and credits to the agencies’ accounts.

Agencies use the IPAC broker to record payments that have been made on their behalf and to start the transfer of funds to collect payment from another agency based on the goods and services delivered.

Information is downloaded from and uploaded to the IPAC broker daily. There are five different transaction types that can be sent to IPAC via an outbound file or received from IPAC via an inbound file. The file format is defined by Treasury. Outbound and inbound files contain records related to transactions within Oracle Fusion Accounts Payable (AP), Accounts Receivable (AR), or Procurement.

Each of the transactions in the inbound file needs to be processed and updated based on the transaction type.

Transaction types include:

• Payments
• Collections
• Adjustments
• Zero-dollar transactions
• SGL information

Payments and collections are the primary transaction types processed through IPAC. How records are processed or generated for the files depends on whether the agency is the buyer or the seller of goods and services and whether the buyer or seller started the transaction. The buyer buys and pays for goods and services, while the seller delivers and collects payments for goods and services. A seller can request and receive funds via IPAC and notify the buyer via the IPAC bulk file.

There are various types of intragovernmental transactions. These include:

• Buying and selling
• Investments and borrowings
• Benefits
• Transfers
• Custodial and nonentity transactions