Career and Career-Conditional Employment (Tenure) Regulation Change

USDA, National Finance Center sent this bulletin at 03/27/2018 04:21 PM EDT

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Career and Career-Conditional Employment (Tenure) Regulation Change

March 27, 2018

Dear Customer:

The National Finance Center is notifying our customers of an Office of Personnel Management (OPM) regulation change. OPM has issued a final regulation to change the criteria for career tenure in the Federal competitive service.

The final rule posted in the Federal Register Vol. 81, No. 216 (78497) on Career and Career-Conditional Employment became effective in December 2016 removed the requirement for creditable service to be substantially continuous. The new rule allows an individual to attain career tenure after completing at least three (3) years of total creditable service.

The final regulation did NOT make, or adopt, changes to any probationary period requirements. This has resulted in Change in Tenure (880) actions falling into suspense with the following error:

  • Employee met tenure requirement and DATE-PROB-PERIOD-START is not = to ZEROS.

At this time there are no programming changes being made to the Bi-Weekly Examination Analysis and Reporting System (BEAR). Agencies will be responsible for ensuring that such actions are processed. The recommended course of action is to delete the NOA 880 from suspense and reprocess the document when an employee has satisfactorily completed the probationary period.

Federal employees with questions concerning this notification should contact their Servicing Personnel Office. Authorized Agency representatives with questions concerning this notification should contact NFC’s Contact Center at either 1-855-632-4468; via email to NFCcontactcenter@nfc.usda.gov or via the ServiceNow Customer Service Portal (CSP).