Unreconciled Payments Report (UPR)

Background

In August 1988 the Inspector General's Office (IG) conducted an audit of the Financial Controls over Personal Property in NOAA. The IG found that significant inaccuracies existed in the financial records showing the costs of nonexpendable personal property in NOAA. The actual amount of NOAA's investment in personal property could not be accurately stated. NOAA was maintaining two separate accounts of property values, one in the personal property system and one in the finance system.

In response to this finding, NOAA, along with the rest of the Department of Commerce, adopted the Property Management Information System maintained by the National Finance Center, Department of Agriculture, as its system of record for its personal property assets. In addition, NOAA modified its finance system to feed the property system with payment data where this data could be matched to the property records. Those payment records that were not matched to a corresponding property records were said to be unreconciled. Thus was born the Unreconciled Payments Report.

Since that time, of course, we have moved off of the NFC system onto Sunflower Assets as NOAA's property management system. And the Finance Office has moved off of the old Financial Information Management Accounting System (FIMA) to the Commerce Administrative Management System (CAMS). There have been some delays in the transition, and we still have not completely got to the point where we were under the old systems where reconciliation could occur automatically. Nevertheless, the UPR still exists and we are still under the mandate to ensure that all property that has been paid for is recorded in the NOAA property management system.

What is the UPR?

NOAA has adopted the internal rule which states that object class codes beginning with 31 will be used only when acquiring accountable personal property. (See http://www.pps.noaa.gov/acctobj.htmfor definitions of accountable property and object class codes.) Therefore, the assumption is that if a payment was made in the finance system using object class code 31, there should be a corresponding record in the property system.

There are exceptions to this rule. Object class codes beginning with 31-5x are used when acquiring property that would ordinarily be accountable, but which is being purchased for a non-NOAA entity. That is, although NOAA is buying the property, the property will never belong to NOAA. Object class codes beginning with 31-3x are used when obligating money that will be used to make periodic payments under a lease agreement. Finally, CWIP Project Codes are used when acquiring equipment that is being assembled or used to construct an asset that will be capitalized when placed into service. (See the CWIP Fact Sheet.) In all of these instances, though the item may appear briefly on the UPR because the payment was made using an object class code beginning with 31, they are immediately removed because they are not actually payments that need to be matched to an item of accountable property that will be recorded in the personal property system.

How does it work?

Once a week, a file is captured out of CBS of all payments against object class code 31 for items other than purchase cards. Purchase card payments are captured out of CBS once a month. These files are sent to a server in Germantown, where a program residing on the server adds these records to those previously existing and displays them on the NOAA Personal Property Web Site. ( http://www.pps.noaa.gov). A data set is captured out of Sunflower from 2003 to current, that is matched against the UPR, and any matches by document number, and the mandatory five fields to include: Document Number, Organization Code, Project Code, Task code, Object Class Code, and amount. If a partial reconciliation or an attempted reconciliation has been made, you will see an Asterisks on the UPR. This indicates that a partial reconciliation has been attempted, or one of more, but not all five mandatory fields match the UPR line. Special attention should be given to the structure of the document numbers as located here http://www.pps.noaa.gov/Guide/DocFormat.html.
Document number used for the Initial Event in the DOC Personal Property Data Base (Sunflower), is the document number that is used to match the UPR line, first and foremost.

CWIP and the UPR
Here's the project code structure for CWIP:

Current concerns

The amount of unreconciled payments has been as high as $75 million and as low as $5 million. Recently, it has hovered around $20 million. This has come to the attention of the Deputy Under Secretary of NOAA. He is now asking the Line Offices to report to him quarterly on progress being made to reduce this figure. The goal this year is to reduce the UPR to less than $5 million. This can only be accomplished if NOAA's program offices ensure that the accountable property they acquire is recorded in the property system timely.