Benefits Administration (Ben Admin or BA) facilitates benefit enrollment activity through automated processes. This guide is designed to help staff in CSU Central Human Resources (HR) and Academic Personnel offices who enter employee information into CHRS to understand which items impact Benefits processing and how to avoid adverse downstream impacts to campus Benefits Officers and ultimately the employee’s benefits. This is not meant as a complete guide for data entry of HR information.

Ben Admin automatically performs the following functions as appropriate and in accordance with CSU processing rules based on the employee’s Job Data and Modify a Person data:

• Assigns (or re-assigns) the employee to the appropriate Benefit Program,
• Determines the employee’s eligibility, continued eligibility or loss of eligibility for each benefit plan, and
• Processes the appropriate benefit transaction and enrollments/dis-enrollments, if applicable.

This guide explains how the following impact or facilitate Ben Admin processing:

• Job (Job Data) and Personal Data (Modify a Person) entry transactions
• Specific Job Data and Modify a Person field updates
• Non-routine transactions: Corrections, retroactive actions, deletions and mass updates.

Note that all employees, whether benefits eligible or non-benefits eligible, are assigned Benefit Record Number 0 in CHRS. No other Benefit Record Number is used in CHRS.

In addition to this guide, users can review the following CMS baseline design specification documents related to this process:

• BA10884_CHRS92_DS_Benefits_Dept_Security
• BA05004_CHRS92_DS_CSUPreProcessing GRP 53

Data items entered into the Personal and Job data records, once saved, are used to determine an employee’s benefits eligibility. Therefore, data must be entered accurately the first time. In the case of a New Hire transaction, all fields should be entered as of the Hire Effective Date. This includes the current local home address, SSN, Date of Birth and Gender. Any omission of benefit-related data impacts the timely enrollment of the employee into eligible benefit plans.

When employee data is saved in Job Data, a Benefit Administration System (BAS) event is created and written to the Review BAS Activity page. When updated home address data with zip code and/or state and/or country changes is saved in the Modify a Person component, a BAS event is created and written to the Review BAS Activity page. The record behind the Review Bas Activity page is BAS_Activity.

The Review BAS Activity page is the Ben Admin processing queue; BAS events reside on the Review BAS Activity page until picked up for Ben Admin processing. CSUBAS nightly Ben Admin processing starts at 7pm for all campuses. Campus Benefits Officers can also process BAS events on demand for an employee via the On Demand Event Maintenance page. Once Ben Admin processing starts for a BAS event, the BAS event leaves the Review BAS Activity page.

Job Data Action/Action-Reason codes are mapped to specific BAS events. The BAS event, also known as the Event Class or BAS Action, determines the benefit processing that will occur in the Ben Admin module. Job Data Action/Action-Reason codes are also mapped to set the Benefits Employee Status. The Benefits Employee Status, also known as the Benefits Status, is a critical status that’s used in Ben Admin eligibility rules and Ben Admin processing. The Benefits Employee Status is independent of the PeopleSoft Payroll Status and the PeopleSoft HR Status. The Benefits Employee Status can only be set via a Job Data Action/Action-Reason code.

View how BAS events and the Benefits Employee Status are tied to Action/Action-Reason code configuration. Access to this Workforce Administration module configuration table is based on your PeopleSoft security settings.

Navigation: Click on the NavBar Icon

, then click on Menu > Set Up HCM > Product Related > Workforce Administration > Action Reasons.

1. Enter an Action code. Use the

lookup icon to see a list of available Job Data action codes.

1. If you know the Reason Code if know. Otherwise, keep this field blank.
2. Select the Include History checkbox.
3. Click on the Search button.
4. The Search Results list appears.

1. Select the desired Action/Action-Reason Code combination.

Example Action/Action-Reason Code Configuration

The above example shows that the LOA/MED action/action-reason code sets the Benefits Employee Status to Leave of Absence for the employee and creates the LVE BAS event for Ben Admin processing. The LVE BAS event in CHRS allows for all of the employee’s benefit coverages to be canceled (waived).

The following Job Data fields are used by CSU in CHRS Ben Admin eligibility and processing:

• Effective Date
• Job Code
• Union Code
• Employee Type
• Benefits Employee Status
• Employee Class
• Pay Group
• FTE
• Duration of Appointment (Elig Fld 1)
• Job Code (Elig Fld 2)
• ACA Eligibility (Elig Fld 3)
• AFTERTAX (Elig Fld 5)
• Work Location Postal Code
• Work Location State
• Work Location Country
• BAS Group ID
• Company
• Benefits System

From the above list, the following three fields are automatically determined when a Save occurs in Job Data using custom PeopleCode:

• Duration of Appointment (Elig Fld 1)
• Job Code (Elig Fld 2)
• ACA Eligibility (Elig Fld 3)

The following fields are manually populated under the direction of the Benefits Officer via correction mode (there is a change control request roadmapped to create a process that sets the BAS Group ID):

• AFTERTAX (Elig Fld 5)
• BAS Group ID

Delivered PeopleCode creates the ADR BAS event when an employee’s home address zip code, state and/or country changes.

• Home Address Postal Code
• Home Address State Code
• Home Address Country

Delivered Ben Admin processing uses the following employee and dependent demographic field values to determine benefit plan participation eligibility:

• Effective Date
• Date of Birth
• Gender

Using correction mode in Job Data to:

• Change a Job Data Effective Date
• Change the Action code
• Change the Action-Reason code, or to
• Delete a Job Data row

can immediately and adversely impact an employee’s benefits since changing the above fields or deleting a Job Data row creates disconnected BAS events in the Ben Admin module. A disconnected event is a broken event that can never be processed or reprocessed by the Ben Admin system. A disconnected BAS event may also require further corrections with the SCO, benefit carriers and CalPERS. Correcting disconnected BAS events is a timely manual process for campus Benefits Officers.

If you need to change the Job Data Effective Date, the Job Data Action Code or Action-Reason Code, or delete a Job Data row using correction mode, use the following steps along with the Campus Benefits Officer to minimize adverse benefit impacts to the employee.

1. Workforce Administration: Contact your campus Benefits Office and tell them that you need to correct the Job Data effective date, delete a Job Data row or change the Action/Reason codes for an existing Job Data row. Provide the current Job Data row effective date, the employee ID and the applicable employment record numbers to the campus Benefits Officer, then stop. Do not continue with your correction until you hear from the campus Benefits Officer that you can continue with your process.
2. Campus Benefits Office: Before the Job Data effective date, Action, Action/Reason has been corrected or the Job Data row deleted, determine if an associated BAS event requires voiding. Prior to voiding the BAS event(s), be sure to print out the employee’s Benefit elections if applicable as you may need to re-enter them after Workforce Administration enters the correction.
3. Campus Benefits Office: After voiding the applicable BAS event(s), go to the Base Benefit pages, Health Benefits, Life and AD/D, Disability, Spending Accounts and verify that the applicable benefit plan enrollments have been deleted.
4. Campus Benefits Office: Advise the Workforce Administration staff member that they can make the Job Data correction/deletion.
5. Workforce Administration: Once you hear from the campus Benefits Office that you can continue your process, make the correction in Job Data and then advise the campus Benefits staff that the correction was made.
6. Campus Benefits Office: Once notified by the Workforce Administration staff that the corrections were made, process the new, correct BAS event(s) if applicable, which may mean entering the employee’s benefit enrollments, and then reprocess any other impacted BAS events using the On Demand Event Maintenance page. Notify benefit carriers/CalPERS of the correction or change, if needed.

When a BAS event to be processed precedes events that have already been processed or when an event has a lower Event Priority value than another event being processed for that participant, the system marks that event with an Out of Sequence flag. This flag indicates that the eligibility information for this event may have changed (may be impacted by these earlier, pending events). Therefore, the event might need to be reprocessed in the Benefits Administration System. Retroactive hire, termination and transfer transactions may cause additional analysis to be completed by the benefits staff and may delay the availability of an employee’s benefits.

Based on campus classification review and Systemwide bargaining unit changes, some retroactive changes are inevitable. When these are entered, communication to the benefits staff must occur so that they can monitor the BAS_ACTIVITY table (Review BAS Activity page) and ensure that the employee’s benefits are updated appropriately.

When information that the system uses to track and/or process an event is deleted at some point after the BAS event was first triggered, the system flags the participant event as being “disconnected”. Once an event is disconnected, it can no longer be processed by the system, except to be voided. There are two ways an event can become disconnected:

1. The updated HR record that originally triggered the event is deleted.
2. One or more HR records needed for eligibility processing no longer exist, i.e., Job Data rows were changed using correction mode.

The disconnection needs to be analyzed to determine any impact on benefit processing. If a BAS event is disconnected after it is finalized, the benefits staff needs to void the event through reprocessing. Correction of the disconnection occurs once the Ben Admin process is executed again.

GSI/SSI (L15) – General Salary Increases Load will still occur in 9.2

Use the Notify toolbar button to send workflow notifications/emails to co-workers regarding a particular employee.

The email notification includes a link to the specific application page requiring review or reference.

The Notify functionality is PeopleSoft delivered as part of the application and requires no special setup.

The next snapshot is of the generic email notification (workflow) created when the user clicks the button.

1. Be sure to copy yourself on the notification so you have a record of it.
2. Enter your message in Message.
3. Below is a snapshot of the email notification the recipient receives (in their email “in” box).