05 origin potential pred successor data
Origin of the Potential Pred/Successor Data
Potential predecessors and successors are found from merged wage records. Individual wage records for a particular social security number (SSN) are drawn from the State Wage Record File for two adjacent quarters. Let’s say that John Doe, SSN 123-45-6789, was employed by the target company, Amalgamated Metal Refiners of USA (U-I 127120) from October through January, but he was laid off in early February. By the first of March, John was hired on at Hannah Mae’s Bakery (U-I 397510), where he started into a new line of work. He would have only one wage record showing for fourth quarter, but two for first quarter since he had worked for both companies during the January-to-March time frame.
The fourth and first quarter data are sent to the potential predecessor/successor file build process as two Employee Transfer Transaction (ETT) records. These records are pairs of U-I account numbers, each noting an employee-to-employer relationship between the two quarters. One record shows him as a “continuous” employee (U-I 127120 to 127120), while the other record identifies him as transferring to another employer (U-I 127120 to 397510). By using the U-I pairs, the EXPO system never needs to “see” any social security numbers, only the affiliated account numbers. Once all of the records are sorted, they are merged into the Predecessor Successor Potential (PSP) File. PSP data produce a list of how many employees stay put, how many transition between employers, and how many appear to be laid off or new hires (by having a U-I account association in only one of the two quarters – leaving the other quarter’s U-I number as X’s).
As you can see, wage records don’t generally provide a good one-for-one relationship with employment values for any given employer. In the first place, there are no separate values for each of the three months of the quarter, since wage records are quarter-specific only. In the second place, there can be multiple pairings listed for a single employee, as John Doe’s case demonstrates. It can become even more involved as well. If a particular person works part time for two or more companies on an ongoing basis, there will be at least four “ETT” records processed for that individual in each quarter pair; a part-time employee for company A and company B would should ETT pairs of A A, A-B, B-A and B-B. Just because people work for more than one company during a quarter does not in any way mean that they must represent an employee transfer, much less a predecessor/successor transition. For example, in the account shown in the page, two pages previously, it appears that there is a predecessor-successor relationship ongoing, but the largest contributor actually is a much larger company that is supplying part-time workers to the other company.
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