GSA cannot be sure that the leave balances for thousands of its employees are accurate, an IG audit has found, saying there are more than 51,000 discrepancies involving nearly 6,900 employees, some of which have been unresolved since January 2013.
The report said the issue was due to flaws in the interface between GSA’s employee leave approval system, called ALOHA, and its time and attendance system, called ETAMS, plus inconsistent application of steps to address the discrepancies.
The average discrepancy was only six hours, it added, but “the volume of these discrepancies raises concern over the reliability and integrity of the leave balance information” in the ETAMS system.
One problem with the interface is that manual entries into an employee’s ETAMS timecard are required in a number of scenarios, including entry of telework and overtime hours, premium pay for holidays worked, and court leave. Unless leave approved through ALOHA is manually entered in ETAMS in those scenarios, the leave balance will be inaccurate, it said.
GSA relies on manual controls to reconcile discrepancies, and those too require tending and are vulnerable to oversights and other errors, it said. “Managers do not routinely adhere to manual control procedures regarding updating ALOHA and ETAMS data. Additionally, employees are not checking their leave balances at the end of the pay period, which allows errors in ETAMS to go unnoticed,” it said.
It said GSA agreed with the assessment and has started steps to reduce discrepancies.