Ri 38-31 Ss

OMB SUPPORTING STATEMENT

RI 38-31 – We Need More Information About Your Missing Payment

1. Justification

1. Title 5, U. S. Code, Chapters 83 and 84, authorizes the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to make monthly payments of retirement benefits, as well as making one-time payments of refunds of retirement deductions and paying lump sums after the death of annuitants and employees. The Department of the Treasury makes these payments in the form of checks or electronic transfers of funds into financial institutions. When a payment is lost, stolen, missing, or does not go into the account of the payee, it is necessary for OPM to obtain a report from the respondent describing the missing payment and stating that the payment was not received or is missing. Such reports may be verbal or written using RI 38-31. When RI 38-31 is used to report that an electronic transfer of funds is missing, the financial institution also states that the payment was not received.

2. RI 38-31 is designed to collect all the information needed by OPM and the Department of the Treasury to replace the payment as soon as possible. The form has been altered to bring it up-to-date. OPM also collects information about missing payments on the telephone. A written notice about the missing payment is not required. If this information is not collected, OPM cannot arrange for replacement payments. The Public Burden Statement meets the requirements of 5 CFR 1320.8(b)(3).

3. The information collected is detailed and can only be obtained from the respondents. There is no technology available to collect this information. However, this form is available on our website in a PDF fillable format and meets our GPEA requirement.

4. Reports of missing payment are filed individually. There is no duplication because the respondents initiate the collection.

5. Information is not collected from small businesses.

6. The collection is needed whenever a payment is reported missing. Less frequent collection would deprive annuitants of their source of income.

7. The collection is consistent with the guidelines in 5 CFR 1320.6.

8. A notice of proposed information collection was published in the Federal Register on December 20, 2007, giving persons outside the agency an opportunity to comment on the form. No comments were received.

9. No payment or gift is given to the respondents.

10. This information collection is protected by the Privacy Act of 1974 and OPM regulations (5 CFR 831.106). The routine uses for disclosure appear in the Federal Register for OPM/Central-1 (64 FR 54930, et seq., October 8, 1999, as amended at 65 FR 25775, May 3, 2000).

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11. The information collection does not include questions of a sensitive nature, such as sexual behavior and attitudes, religious beliefs, and other matters that are commonly considered private.

12. Approximately 8,000 reports of missing payments are processed each year. Of these, we estimate that 7,800 are reports of missing checks. Approximately 200 reports of missing checks are reported using RI 38-31 and 7,600 are reported by telephone. A response time of ten minutes per form reporting a missing check is estimated; the same amount of time is needed to report the missing checks or electronic funds transfer (EFT) payments using the telephone. The annual burden for reporting missing checks is 1,300 hours. The remaining 200 reports relate to EFT payments. No missing EFT payments are reported using RI 38-31. The annual burden for reporting missing EFT payments is 33 hours. The total burden is 1,333 hours.

13. There is no cost to the respondents resulting from the collection of this information.

14. The annualized cost to the Federal government is $32,989. The cost is determined by employee hours devoted to the collection, forms cost, and overhead.

15. There are no changes to the respondent burden.

16. The results of this information collection are not published.

17. It is not cost effective to reprint the whole supply of forms to change the OMB clearance expiration date. Therefore, we seek approval not to display the date on the form.

18. There are no exceptions to the certification statement.