The National Finance Center is the USDA’s payroll processing provider. They recently mailed Corrected 2020 Wage and Tax Statements to some employees, including some Forest Service employees. These statements include the employee’s full name, full social security number, home address, and employer information. Unfortunately, NFC mistakenly used the employee mailing addresses on file for 2020. Because of this, they mailed some statements to the incorrect addresses. This is a breach of Personal Identifiable Information for some employees.

Who Does this Affect?

• All employees affected by this PII breach will be, or have been, notified by NFC.
• This breach does not apply to all Forest Service employees. It only applies to you if:
  • You had Social Security tax (OASDI tax) deferred in 2020, AND
  • You repaid those taxes in full, AND
  • You had a corrected W-2 statement NFC mailed to an incorrect address. This is only likely if you had a change of address since 2020. The U.S. Postal Service was able to correct some of the statements that NFC mailed to incorrect addresses by either rerouting the mail to correct addresses or returning the mail to NFC. Despite the Postal Service rerouting or returning the mail, some of the statements that NFC mailed were still delivered to incorrect addresses.

Next Steps

• If you received a notice from NFC with information on how to sign up for an optional free credit monitoring service, you must sign up by Oct. 31, 2022.
• The original purpose of producing and mailing the corrected W-2 statements was to document the difference in Social Security tax withheld after the repayment of deferred taxes from March 2021 through December 2021. Social Security Tax is the common name for Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance. The statements list it as Social Security tax. The Internal Revenue Service supplied guidance about these corrected statements previously this year. We published an HRM Update on May 17 about what you need to do, if anything, about these corrected W2 statements for 2020. Please review the HRM Update for more information. 
• Since this incident, NFC has fixed the incorrect addresses and mailed out notices to all potentially impacted employees. This is a matter they take very seriously. They take responsibility and they are committed to making sure the appropriate oversight and protocols are in place to prevent this situation in the future.
• HRM is sharing this information for awareness.