Electronic Processing of Revenues and Expenditures, Including Texas.gov Portal Activity (APS 029)

Responsibilities

Comptroller’s Office

The Comptroller’s office authorizes state agencies to accept credit, charge and debit cards for the payment of fees, taxes and other state agency-assessed charges.

When notified that an agency will accept online payments, the agency’s appropriation control officer (ACO) must verify the agency’s unique USAS coding information for processing revenue and expenditure activity.

The expenditures recorded in USAS for transaction fees and processing costs may be selected for review by the Comptroller’s post-payment audit staff. Supporting documentation for these expenses may be contained on electronic files provided by the agency.

Testing

To initiate electronic processing of revenue and expenditures in USAS, agencies must notify the Comptroller’s office to perform testing. After three consecutive successful days of error-free processing, agencies will be certified to move their application into production.

If an agency needs to change the USAS coding information to an existing certified application, the agency must first complete three consecutive successful days of error-free processing for all coding lines associated with the fee code being updated. (Examples would include changes to comptroller object, agency object, program cost account [PCA], index and transaction code [T-code].)

Changes to transaction amount only require one error-free day of processing.

Changes to appropriation year designation or inferred elements do not require additional testing.

Changes to the agency vendor or the system it uses to process transactions require one error-free day of processing for one fee code.

CAPPS agencies will also need to make the necessary code block changes, additions, etc. in CAPPS GL.

CAPPS cash receipt agencies must open an application service provider (ASP) ticket with CAPPS production support to request testing and verification of the additional code block changes to be reflected in CAPPS CR. The agency will then submit a test file through its test licensing systems to Texas.gov and the treasury interface for loading to the CAPPS CR system. Changes made to the code block, speedcharts and cash receipt fee codes must be reflected and validated in CAPPS financials.

Riders

Agencies with General Appropriations Act (GAA) riders titled Appropriations Limited to Revenue Collection or Contingent Revenue must cover the cost of their appropriations through the revenue they collect. Agencies that can adjust license fees to cover costs must consider these riders when determining fees.

For compliance with the Appropriations Limited to Revenue Collection rider, all revenues collected (including online processing fees) must cover all costs incurred by the agency.

For any Contingent Revenue riders, the online processing fee revenue collected to cover the cost of processing credit card, internet and other noncash transactions is accounted for separately and will not be included to determine compliance with this rider. Only the amounts deposited in unappropriated general revenue and not accounted for separately as online processing fees will be considered when determining compliance with the Contingent Revenue rider(s).