Hurricane not expected to disrupt payroll, TSP services

[The Straight Story]

Hurricane not expected to disrupt payroll, TSP services

By Karen Rutzick and Amelia Gruber
[e-mail]

Federal payroll and Thrift Savings Plan services will continue even though Hurricane Katrina forced the evacuation of the New Orleans office that processes paychecks for hundreds of thousands of employees and stores TSP data, officials said Monday.

The roughly 1,500 employees of the Agriculture Department's National Finance Center in eastern New Orleans are relocating to two emergency locations - one near Dallas and the other in Philadelphia, said Ed Loyd, a department spokesman. Before they left Sunday, they finished processing and transmitting payroll information for the current pay period, he said.

The National Finance Center processes paychecks for 500,000 federal employees at a variety of agencies. Those workers shouldn't notice any irregularities, Loyd said. The finance center also has backup versions of all pay records, which are now stored electronically, he said.

"Most employees will never know that anything has occurred," Loyd said.

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