11 wage data editing program es2wa03
Wage Data Editing (Program ES2WA03)
The editing of summarized wage record data can be a useful final verification of employment and wage data prior to submitting the BLS EQUI deliverable. These edits have been established by the BLS National Office. Although they are still supported under the MicMac architecture, they are placed at the end of the hierarchical structure. This last-place relegation is primarily due to the lack of availability of these data in some States, but secondarily because of delays associated with the receipt and processing of wage record data (this makes the information less timely than standard Micro File data).
This process of editing the Wage Summary File is optional for the State, since not all QCEW units will have access to summarized wage record data. Even some States that do have such access will consider the computer and other costs associated with summarizing the data too great when weighed against the tardiness of the data and the collection thereof.
The Wage Summary File must be up to date before this program can be executed. The original wage data come from the State’s employee-level wage data file. This information is generally not fully available until four or five months after the end of the quarter. By that time, most of the clean-up processing of Micro File data has been completed. Thus the wage data, although potentially useful, are absent for most of the quarter’s processing cycle. On the other hand, with the advent of the MicMac multi-quarter processing, there can still be additional editing performed on the prior quarter after the initial general EQUI release, since there are essentially four months available for tracking down additional questionable fields. This may be less feasible in practice, since there generally needs to be a substantive reason for back-checking relatively finalized data for many States.
Data for this file are collected by the State-specific program ES2WA01, which produces a “Wage Temporary File” of summed employee record counts and wage totals for each employer. For this situation, worksites are excluded from processing, since most States have no employee-level worksite wage data available; only single and master accounts are included in the summarized wage data records. The Wage Temporary File produced by the ES2WA01 program is read into the ES2WA02 program, which incorporates the data into the Wage Summary File, containing up to six quarters of summarized wage and employment count information.
The wage edits program (ES2WA03) compares the Wage Summary File data to the corresponding employment and wage fields in the Micro File. The formulation for these edits is not nearly as involved as the standard micro edits, described earlier in this appendix. Nonetheless, they provide important facts that can either verify otherwise questionable employment and/or total wage data, or can show where a data entry error or some other problem has crept into a single or master account’s data refinement.
The tolerances for the wage data edits are found in the Lookup File’s “PK” records. In addition to these, however, program-processing switches are employed to determine which edits can be run and how the reports should be constructed. These switches are described in the Job 061D parameters outlined in Appendix H - Parameter Descriptions. The PK records will be dealt with during the description of individual edits. Two of the parameter switches (the Wage Record Count Availability Switch and the Wage Record Wages Availability Switch) are critical to proces¬sing, since the lack of data availability will skip all edits dealing with that portion of the data.
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