11 code 091 large monthly employment change
Large Monthly Employment Change - Code 091
This is the first of seven “large” employment and wage edit exceptions. These parallel some of the processes of the standard employment/wage edits in code range 126 through 140. The difference between the “large” and “standard” edits is the size of the tolerances. The PK053 (employment) and PK059 (wage) multiplier parameters are used to adjust the allowable tolerances to see if the exception is only out of line or out of the ballpark.
The standard employment month-to-month change edit is described in detail with the Code 126 portion of this appendix, appearing later. Rather than rehash the description here, please refer to that section for employment change editing philosophy. Suffice it to say that this is a six-tiered editing method that requires all six sub-edits to fail in order to flag the establishment for an employment fluctuation problem (there are certain exceptions that are described in the Code 126 edit documentation). The names of these six sub-edits are:
- 1. Current month to prior month absolute change.
- 2. Current month to prior month percent change.
- 3. Current month to prior month t-test.
- 4. Current month to year ago absolute change.
- 5. Current month to year ago percent change.
- 6. Current month to year ago t-test.
The term “current” in this case refers to the edited quarter value. Since this edit deals with quarterly data items, it will be conducted for both the current and prior quarter (future and current quarter in Job 002F, older quarters in Job 028S). The six listed steps will be fully expounded upon in the Code 126 description. The only portions that are changed for this edit are the tolerance values in sub-edit #1 and sub-edit #4 (absolute change edits). Here the allowed tolerance from the standard edit is multiplied by the PK053 multiplier parameter (with a default value of 10). If the changes exceed this much higher cutoff point, the 091 code is assigned rather than 126. That means the lower numbered edit code will place a greater emphasis on the extreme employment fluctuations than on those less volatile. This is especially true when the edit exception code is included as one of the sort parameters for the micro edits (specified in the Job 001Q parameters via the ES2N screen processing).
Even though the special multiplier is used for the absolute change tolerances (such as 30 employees to 300), the same is not true of the percentage change (like 30% to 300%) or the t-test (2.365 to 23.65 T-value). It is therefore not a complete adjustment of the editing tolerances, but it is close enough in its application. There really needs only to be one such multiplier because of the six-tiered approach; if an employer jumps from 5 to 120 employees in a month, it shouldn’t be necessary to check that the percentage change (2300%) exceeds a high limit. In addition, a decrease cannot exceed 100%, so such a large multiplier would make no sense for the reverse type of change (120 to 5 employment could never be a 300% decrease).
When the large monthly employment change edit identifies one of these highly volatile accounts, the months showing extreme changes are underscored on the edit report. If some of the months of employment would fail the Code 126 error, but others go all the way to the Code 091 magnitude, only the 091 code will be used in the edit codes. However, months failing Code 126 will also be underscored even though the 091 code is not truly applicable to all of the flagged fields. That means that three employment months such as 50, 15, and 1500 would underscore both the 15 and the 1500, but the more severe 091 code would be applied due to the extreme jump to 1500, which is not in the same class as the “paltry” drop from 50 to 15.
Since this is one of the employment/wage edits, it can be associated with macro data in the integrated edits. Whenever integrated edit processing is enacted (in Job 242D), an account with this edit will be assigned to the macro portion of the edit report if the county-owner-NAICS coding to which it belongs appears in the Macro Edit File. Although this edit cannot be considered “crucial”, it can still represent a “gross” edit exception, if the employment or total wages meet the PK067 or PK068 cutoff levels. BLS classification: A.1.5 or B.1.6, depending on employer size. EXPO “G” code: A091 or B091. However, it should be rare for a “B” level 091 code to appear.
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