Saving taxpayers millions by upgrading payroll technology

Challenge: USDA’s National Finance Center (NFC) pays and manages benefits for nearly a third of the federal workforce, serving 170 agencies and 605,000 employees. Decades of underinvestment have left NFC running on outdated systems that struggle to keep up with demand. The Government Accountability Office stated that updating these systems is critical and essential to the reliability and security of NFC’s payroll technology. Without immediate action, the risk of system failure or cyber threats will escalate, potentially jeopardizing the delivery of paychecks and benefits to hundreds of thousands of federal employees. Rising maintenance costs and a shrinking pool of programmers with knowledge of the aging code compound that threat.

Approach: With TMF support, USDA is replacing the legacy payroll system with a cloud-based platform built around artificial intelligence and automation to:

• Consolidate more than 50 separate applications into one shared environment that meets FedRAMP security requirements
• Apply layered security controls, including threat detection, encryption, and access management
• Launch through early test runs, a pilot within USDA, and a staged expansion to NFC’s other customer agencies
• Build NFC’s payroll foundation behind HR 2.0, the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) plan to rebuild federal HR systems government-wide 

OPM has reviewed and endorsed the plan, confirming it aligns with HR 2.0, and both agencies have committed to coordinating milestones as implementation moves forward.