California State Payroll System (CSPS) Project

The State of California has embarked on a multiyear endeavor to modernize the State’s human resources and payroll systems. The CSPS Project is primarily a Human Resource Management project that is designed to take the opportunity to improve the core administrative functions through innovation and improvements.    

CSPS Project Vision

The California State Payroll System (CSPS) Project will modernize the human resource management, travel advance and expense management, and payroll systems used by approximately 300,000 state government employees in order to provide accurate and timely personnel and payroll service with quality customer service.

Mission Statement

The California State Payroll System (CSPS) Project is an initiative to modernize the current Uniform State Payroll System (USPS). The CSPS Project supports SCO's organizational goal to "deliver core services and products more effectively through innovative business processes and technology solutions." The CSPS Project team provides leadership and direction for the project's scope, schedule, and resources to deliver a successful personnel and payroll system.

Project Objectives

• Enhanced online view capabilities for payroll, employment history, leave balances, and tax information
• Improved end user functionality to allow employee/manager access to update bank information, tax withholdings, and employee addresses. 
• Improved reporting capabilities to provide users with user-friendly ad-hoc reporting tools
• Automated validation checks to proactively provide point of entry validation and compliance checks to reduce manual re-work processing time.

Background

The original systems that make up the Uniform Payroll System were built in the late 1970’s. The existing system pre-dates the start of collective bargaining in the state which meant the base design of the system had to change to accommodate all of the complexities that have developed over the past four and a half decades. In the 90’s, it was recognized that the legacy systems needed to be modernized, however, due to a significant economic downturn, the modernization effort was paused until the 21st Century project began in 2004.  Over the course of the next 10 years, the project failed to deliver the MyCalPAYS solution. However, given that technology has changed so much just even in the past 10 years, CSPS can now take advantage of cloud-based service offerings. The CSPS Project began in 2016.