Question: A client recently asked for assistance in resolving a problem where they were receiving pay/deduction overflow massages on the ETF table when they ran the CTXG report.

The challenge is that with emPath 6.3 there is a limitation of 42 pays and deductions on the employee tax (ETF / ETF2) tables. Making the challenge even harder is that there is a limit of 12 pay and deduction codes on the tax group (TGF) table. The code on the TGF can be wild carded which often causes multiple pays and deductions to be added to the ETF which are not needed.

The best solution to this issue is to upgrade to emPath 6.4 where these limitations have been relaxed. However, if you are using emPath 6.3 the following steps will help in resolving the problem

(1) Identify the employees and tax groups impacted.  Following is a SQL statement which will identify those employees with a value of 42 in pay/deduction occurances column.

select em_employee_id, etf_tax_group

 from etf

where etf_pay_ded_data_occurs_count = 42;

(2) Review the tax groups identified in step 1 vs the pays and deductions paid in the year as reported on the E-H-R report.  When running the E-H-R report enter "T" in the sort by column such that the report will provide totals by tax group.

 
(3) If possible change the tax group pay/deduction codes to workaround the overflow issue.  Following is a before and after screen print of just such a change.  You can see code AWARD was removed then MEM***** was replaced by MEMPEN** and MEMR****

  
(4) Re-run CTXG and verify that the overflow massages no longer appear.  The proceed to the running of UPTX.

In this case I received the following thank you email after quickly and successfully resolving the issue:



Note that it is not always this easy.  In some cases one has to use SQL to update the ETF and ETF2 tables replacing pay and deduction codes which have zero amounts with codes for those which were not successfully added due to the overflow.