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Payroll Manual

NYSTEP Certification

General Information

As pursuant to the Civil Service Law, Section 100, no officer of the State may approve any salary payment for personal service to any person holding a position in the classified service unless the Department of Civil Service has certified that the person is employed in that position in accordance with law, and rules made pursuant to law. Accordingly, OSC is required to ensure that all employees in the classified service have been certified by DCS and that key information contained in PayServ is the same as the information contained in DCS’s NYSTEP system. Therefore, when the actions identified below under the heading “Transactions Requiring DCS Certification” are reported in PayServ, the agency must also report the actions in DCS’s NYSTEP system.

The deadline for entering transactions into NYSTEP is generally the Friday prior to the PayServ submission deadline. During the week the PayServ transactions are being audited by OSC, DCS reviews and certifies the transactions entered into NYSTEP to ensure the employee meets the qualifications of that position. At the end of the audit week, DCS submits all certified transactions by file to OSC.

If there is a change to a transaction entered into NYSTEP, the agency must make sure the same changes are made in PayServ. Since the NYSTEP cutoff is before the PayServ cutoff, the agency will have time to add any new transaction that are needed. Any discrepancies as described below may result in issues that may prevent the employee from being paid.

As the certifiable transactions entered into PayServ by agency are inserted on the Job record, the system also creates a record on the employee’s Job Certification page to reflect the effective date, action, position number, and the position attributes for both the regular and NYS positions. For each row inserted on the Job Certification page, the certification flag on that row is automatically set to “Not Certified”. If more than one certifiable transaction is inserted on the Job record and the effective dates are different, a separate row will be inserted on the Job Certification page for each transaction and the certification flag on each row will be set to “Not Certified”. If more than one certifiable transaction is reported on Job for the same effective date, rows will be inserted into the Job Certification record for each certifiable transaction and will be sequenced accordingly. However, all transactions that are not “top of stack” for a particular effective date will automatically be updated by the certification program from Not Certified to Approved, as the top of stack transaction overrides any under rows for the same effective date.

After the DCS file which contains all transactions certified in NYSTEP by DCS is received by OSC, a special certification program is run that will compare the transactions on the DCS file to the transactions on the Job Certification page. If the compare process results in a match between the PayServ and NYSTEP record, the Job Certif flag will be flipped from Not Certified to Approved. The following further describes the match process.

For each employee on the NYSTEP file, the system will determine if the employee exists in PayServ:

  • If the employee does not exist in PayServ, the system will place the DCS transaction in a holding file to be checked again in the following pay period.
  • If the employee exists in PayServ, the system will determine if there is a row on the employee’s Job Certification record with the same effective date as the DCS transaction.
    1. If no match is found on effective date, the system will place the transaction in a holding file to be reviewed again the following pay period.
    2. If a match is found on effective date, the system will compare all fields in PayServ against the DCS fields. NOTE: If the employee has more than one page on the Job Certification record with the same effective date, the system will start with the highest sequence number for that effective date and do the compare and if no is match found, the system will then review all other Not Certified rows with the same effective date to determine if there is row that has matching information.
      • If all critical fields match (dept, position, title, grade, percent), the system will update the status on the Job Certification page to “Approved” and then will go on to match all non-critical fields (BU, JC, Appt code, line number, full/part-time indicator). If there is a mismatch on a non-critical field, the system will report the error on the NHRP519 Agency Mismatch Report. The agency will have access to view this report in Control D and should do so routinely and correct the error in PayServ and/or NYSTEP accordingly.
      • If any of the critical fields do not match (dept, position, title, grade, percent), the employee’s status on the Job Certification page will remain Not Certified.

After all transactions on the DCS file and those on the holding file from a previous period have been compared against the Job Certification page and the match process is complete, the NHRP reports identified below are generated for review by OSC or agency, identifying the results of that match process.

Transactions Requiring DCS Certification

  • Hire
  • Rehire
  • Concurrent Hire
  • Return from Leave
  • Return from Disability
  • Chg PT Full
  • Transfer
  • Work Percentage Change
  • Position Change (provided one or more of the following critical fields are changing: dept, regular position number, grade, title, and percentage worked.) Exception: Position Changes with a reason of Z10 and Pos/TSC which are title structure changes that were done by DCS and do not require the agency to enter a NYSTEP transaction for the impacted employees. Rather, DCS automatically adds the new title to the NYSTEP record of impacted employees.