Cost of Employing Specific VA Staff
This page briefly describes the four sources of employment costs: Federal salary schedules, the VA general ledger (FMS), the Managerial Cost Accounting (MCA) System, VA Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW), and the VA payroll system (PAID or HR-PAS). It also explains the creation and use of applied hourly compensation rates.
Employment Cost Sources
Federal Schedule
If an employee's grade and step is known, the gross annual salary may be obtained from federal salary schedules. These schedules are available on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) website. Note, in addition to a general wage table, the OPM web site also has tables for the geographic adjustment of wages. Employers also pay taxes, contribute to insurance premiums, and make other benefit payments. Researchers at the Palo Alto VA medical center estimate that these additional costs equal to 30% of an employee's salary. Thus, a reasonable estimate of annual employment costs is 130% of the gross annual salary.
FMS
A more precise estimate may be obtained from the Financial Management System (FMS), also known as the VA general ledger. FMS reports all labor costs including benefits and employer contributions to taxes. Because FMS tallies the number of hours worked, the average cost per hour of work can also be determined.
Employment hours and costs may be determined separately by facility and occupation type (also known as the Budget Object Code, or BOC). Data are reported separately for each VA facility, allowing researchers to determine local costs in addition to national averages. The data are also divided into scores of BOCs, roughly 72 different occupation types based on the number of unique BOCs. For example, BOC 1081 represents full-time physicians, and BOC 1061 represents registered nurses. By looking at specific BOCs, analysts may determine costs for particular occupation types. FMS lacks specificity in some staffing codes, particularly for administrative personnel. A diverse group of administrative employees with a wide range of salaries is represented by a single BOC code.
FMS data is available through reports on the VHA Support Service Center (VSSC). More information about VSSC, including how to request access web reports, is available on the VHA Data Portal (VA intranet only: http://vaww.vhadataportal.med.va.gov/DataSources/VSSCWebReports.aspx). See the HERC guidebook on FMS (VA intranet only: https://vaww.herc.research.va.gov/files/BOOK_498.pdf) which lists relevant files with variable names and formats.
Managerial Cost Accounting Extracts
The Managerial Cost Accounting (MCA; formerly Decision Support System (DSS)) is a utilization and cost database system implemented at every VA facility. Extracts from the local MCA systems are combined to create a set of National Data Extracts (NDEs). The NDE for inpatient and outpatient care contains both labor workload (hours) and expenditures. These figures may be used to calculate average wages. As with FMS, the MCA NDE data are available by facility and by BOC.
HERC published a technical report on determining wages for VA employees (VA intranet only: https://vaww.herc.research.va.gov/files/RPRT_482.pdf). It describes how to access FMS and MCA data through the VHA Support Services Center (VSSC) web site. A table in a supplemental document (VA intranet only: https://vaww.herc.research.va.gov/files/RPRT_483.xls) shows average annual and hourly wages by BOC for fiscal years 2000-2008. This work was updated in the HERC guidebook "Researcher's Guide to Estimating VHA Labor Costs", including a supplemental Excel file comparing hourly wages by BOC for fiscal years 2000-2016.
HERC also published a guidebook (Intranet-only: https://vaww.herc.research.va.gov/files/BOOK_623.pdf) that provides information on how the MCA Account Level Budgeter (ALB) National Data Extract (NDE) is created, how to access the ALB, and describes variables in the ALB.
CDW
The VA Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW) contains staffing information in the Staff and SStaff tables. The variable TerminationDate reflects the date a staff member's VISTA account was terminated, but does not necessarily mean termination of employment. The variable TerminationReason may describe why the account was terminated, which may include non-use of the account, transfer to another facility, retirement, resignation, etc. For definitive employment records, PAID (or HR-PAS) data will show payroll history for staff members and last pay period.
PAID or HR-PAS
The VA payroll system, PAID (or HR-PAS), has specific information on payroll and human resources characteristics of every VA employee. Among many data elements unique to PAID are highest educational degree, immigrant status, and T&L (time and leave) code that identifies the specific department or section in which the employee works. PAID data are highly confidential. Access to them is strictly controlled and not guaranteed. Investigators with a demonstrable need for PAID data and very strong data-security procedures may request access; contact HERC for further information. View the HERC guidebook for information about using PAID data in research (VA intranet-only: https://vaww.herc.research.va.gov/files/BOOK_628.pdf).
Applied Time versus Total Time
We can divide an employee's total hours at work into applied time spent on direct patient care and related activities, and overhead time for administrative tasks unrelated to care (e.g., serving on institutional committees), sick leave, annual leave, holidays, training, and any continuing medical education (CME) that occurs during scheduled work hours. We refer to the ratio of applied time to total time as the applied rate. There are 261 weekdays in a year, and thus someone who has 26 days of overhead time has an applied rate of about 90%. If there are 8 hours per workday, a 90% applied rate corresponds to 1879.2 hours of applied time out of 2088 total hours.
The applied rate plays a role in figuring staffing costs. The cost of staff time is meant to measure an employer's cost of performing the intervention. Interventions always constitute applied time. If nurses have an average applied rate of 90%, then in theory no more than 90% of a nurse's time could be spent on an intervention. When figuring the cost of an intervention, therefore, one must calculate the hourly applied cost, equal to the total annual cost divided by the total number of applied hours:
Hourly applied cost = total annual cost / total applied hours
The applied cost simply recognizes that employees spend time on overhead activities like sick leave and administrative work. As a result, less than 100% of a person's time can be spent doing clinical work. Suppose that a VA registered nurse has a 90% applied rate and a total annual cost of $71,500. If she works 2088 hours per year, her hourly total and applied costs will be as follows:
Hourly total cost = total annual cost / total hours
= 71500 / 2088 = $34.24
Hourly applied cost = total annual cost / total applied hours
= 71500 / (2088*0.90) = $38.05
The actual applied rate varies by person due to differences in annual leave and sick leave, supervisory duties, and other factors. Full-time regular VA employees are generally eligible for at least 13 days of annual leave and 10 Federal holidays, yielding a maximum applied rate of approximately 91% if all leave is taken. Registered nurses earn more annual leave, however, and many states require physicians and nurses to undertake as many as 50 hours of CME per year. Thus, an applied rate of 85-90% for non-medical staff and 80-85% for licensed medical staff is more realistic. A survey of staff members concerning their applied rate when at work would provide more accurate estimates but might not generalize to other VA facilities or sites outside the VA.
Published analyses must state clearly what applied rate was assumed for each type of employee in the analysis. A brief explanation of the distinction between hourly total cost and hourly applied cost will benefit readers unfamiliar with the concept of applied rates.
Finding the Budget of a VA Medical Center
If you wish to find the expenditures of the medical care appropriation for past years, you should tabulate the Financial Management System (FMS) or the MCA Account Level Budgeter (ALB) database. Tabulations are easily accessed from the VHA Support Service Center (VSSC) Finance reports page.
Past year expenditures
Total expenditures by station for past years can be obtained from the summary VA general ledger, the FMS system. The FMS gives total expenditures for each medical center, including the medical care appropriation, as well as other VA funds, e.g., research funds.
The best source of information by patient care department is available from MCA. Department level costs are available from ALB. It is also possible to find the mean cost of each outpatient clinic (characterized by three digit MCA identifier, the clinic stop), and the mean cost of days spent in each type of inpatient unit (characterized by two digit MCA treating specialty code, also known as the bedsection). This information is easily obtained from VSSC reports.
Current and Next Year's Allocations
The current and next year's allocation of medical care appropriation to each network is found at the Allocation Resource Center website (Intranet-only: http://vaww.arc.med.va.gov).
The networks office or the fiscal office of a medical center would be able to provide anticipated expenditures (budget) at the facility level.
Related Guidebooks
HERC's Medicare Wage Index for VA Facilities: HERC combined data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the VHA Support Services Center (VSSC) to create a Medicare wage index for VA facilities.
Researchers’ Guide to the Account Level Budgeter (ALB) (VA intranet only: https://vaww.herc.research.va.gov/files/BOOK_623.pdf): This guide provides information on how the Decision Support System (DSS) Account Level Budgeter (ALB) National Data Extract (NDE) is created, how to access the ALB, and describes variables in the ALB. Examples of how the ALB may be used in research are also discussed.
Research Guide to the Managerial Cost Accounting National Cost Extracts: This document reports on the four NDEs that the MCA Office refers to as the core NDEs: the inpatient discharge (DISCH), inpatient treating specialty (TRT), observation treating specialty (OBT), and outpatient (OPAT) files. This handbook describes the contents of the MCA core NDEs and provides instructions on how they may be used.
Researcher’s Guide to Estimating VHA Labor Costs: HERC created a dataset that provides hourly labor cost estimates by job category from both FMS and MCA/DSS ALB sources for every year since the 2000 Federal fiscal year. This guide provides information on both FMS and ALB data sources, methods used to create the dataset, and recommendations about using each dataset.
Research guide to the VA Financial Management System (FMS) (VA intranet only: https://vaww.herc.research.va.gov/files/BOOK_498.pdf): This HERC guidebook lists the contents of FMS datasets and contrasts FMS with other VA costs datasets, explains the meanings of variables in FMS files, describes how to access the data, offers tips on using the data to estimate wages, and provides a bibliography of published studies that used FMS data.
Guidebook for Research Use of PAID Data (VA intranet only: https://vaww.herc.research.va.gov/files/BOOK_628.pdf): This HERC guidebook offers all of the information that the researchers learned about the History and Master Files while conducting multiple analyses of the data.
Last updated: April 24, 2023
