Best Reporting Practices

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Retirement Contributions

When reporting wages, on behalf of your employees participating in the NDPERS retirement system, your organization must be consistent. Otherwise, your employee's retirement benefit could be impacted. Keep in mind that not all earned wages are eligible to be reported to NDPERS as retirement contributions.

Use these 9 tips when reporting eligible wages to NDPERS:

  1. Report payroll for all employees according to your regular pay period schedule. For instance, when paying employees early due to an upcoming holiday or a pay date falling on a weekend, you must report wages to NDPERS according to the regular pay cycle.
  2. Understand which earnings are eligible to report to NDPERS. Print the Definition of Wages & Salary as your quick guide when reporting eligible earnings to NDPERS. Overtime is not eligible.
  3. Use the Retirement Contribution Decision Tree to determine if an employee’s earnings (wages or salary) should be considered an eligible agreement/contract, and, if so, reported to NDPERS.
  4. Annualize bonuses over a 12 month period.*
  5. Spread retro payments to the months earned.*
  6. Add comments for all adjustments and provide this information:
    1. What is the adjustment for?
    2. What is the appropriate month(s) it applies to?
  7. Explain salary variances, resulting from abnormally high (or low) wages, by adding a comment.
  8. Process new employees in two steps:
    1. Employer (you) must enter employee’s new hire info into Employer Self Service (ESS). Your new hire will then be automatically enrolled in the appropriate retirement plan by NDPERS.
    2. Employer (you) must generate the benefit enrollment report to ensure accurate entry of the employee’s deduction into your payroll system.  Encourage your employees to enter their designation of beneficiaries and keep them up-to-date.  
  9. Correct common mistakes that could affect your employee's retirement as promptly as you can.

*Wages paid for bonus or retro payments should not be reported on regular payroll reports, but should instead be submitted as adjustment reports.