As of ECC 6.0 enhancement package 4 SP02, SAP has delivered an alternative option to the claim clearing process and it is called the Overpayment Recovery solution. There has been a lot of interest and discussion on this new offering but to my knowledge only a few clients have implemented the functionality.
The current claim clearing functionality “out of box” tries to immediately recover the claim which often leads to an employee having several periods without a paycheck. This isn’t acceptable to most clients based on legal requirements, union agreements, state laws (ie California) and general business practice. Typically a custom solution has to be built which is complex to manage, maintain and support. I have been doing SAP Payroll consulting for 12 years and troubleshooting claims at clients that I didn’t implement the original solution, is typically the most time consuming production support item.
SAP has developed its Overpayment Recovery solution based on best practices among the user community. Some of the features include the following:
- No longer need to create clearing wage types matching every possible taxability (PC71) to ensure accurate clearing of overpayments. At my large clients we would typically have 60-80 claim clearing wage types to handle total forgiveness, total repayment, and partial forgiveness.
- Configuration settings that turn on or off the automatic clearing of overpayments as well as setting overpayments recovery thresholds levels. There are laws in several states that this functionality will allow clients to meet.
- Year-end tax filing will no longer be complicated by claims situations.
- Solution is concurrent employment (CE) enabled.
- Ability to collect back overtime, recover claims over multiple pay periods, and adjust taxable wages at the point of collection.
- Ability to check minimum wage requirements before recovery of overpayment.
- New payroll results cluster table stores the details of the overpayment and balance information.
- Payroll functions to calculate the overpayment and allow for repayment of the debt based on configuration.
- Ability to override business rules through an overpayment recovery infotype. The new US Overpayment Recovery Infotype (IT 0909) tracks employee consent, employer notification attempt, total forgiveness, partial forgiveness, and repayment amount.
I would highly recommend that new SAP Payroll customers install the Overpayment Recovery solution and it is my belief that over the next few 5 years many of the existing US payroll customers will move to this functionality once they become aware of the advantages of the offering.
