United States 

Office of 

Personnel Management 

The Federal Government’s Human Resources Agency

Benefits Administration Letter 

Number: 13-202 Date: June 24, 2013

Subject: CLER Enhancement to Provide Premium Payment Data to Carriers 

Background 

Federal payroll offices currently transmit Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) data of their 

employees or annuitants electronically to the National Finance Center (NFC) on a quarterly basis. 

This data is used by the Centralized Electronic Enrollment Reconciliation Clearinghouse, also 

known as CLER, to identify enrollment discrepancies. 

Since the inception of CLER in 2002, the agencies and FEHB carriers have made great progress in 

reducing the number of enrollment discrepancies between agency and carrier records. Using 

CLER, the carriers’ error rate has been reduced from 15% in 2002 to 2% currently. Thanks to the 

work put in by federal agency personnel in resolving enrollment discrepancies, this has resulted in

removing ineligible enrollees from carrier enrollment rolls and elimination of the automatic 1% 

loading added to Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) plan rates, saving the government and 

enrollees money. 

New Procedures 

In order to further improve the enrollment reconciliation process, every pay period the Office of 

Personnel Management (OPM) will provide FEHB carriers with a list of enrolled individuals and 

premium payment data for each individual. Resolving enrollment discrepancies is only half of the 

problem. Carriers must resolve discrepancies in the premiums remitted to them as well. 

NFC is developing a new Pay Period Transmissions – Payment Amounts report in the CLER 

Reports menu. This report will allow carriers to view the remitted FEHB premiums by enrollee. 

This new report is in addition to the quarterly identification of enrollment discrepancies. The 

quarterly matching of enrollment records of the payroll offices and FEHB carriers with the 

identification of enrollment discrepancies will continue. 

Beginning March 1, 2014, payroll offices will transmit enrollee information to NFC each pay 

period. NFC and OPM will use the data to provide participating health carriers with ongoing 

FEHB enrollment and premium payment information, in addition to the quarterly identification of 

enrollment discrepancies. Once NFC goes operational with the new file format, NFC will not be 

able to accept old format CLER data submissions from payroll offices. 

The means of transmission and transmission destination are not changing, but the frequency of 

transmission is changing from quarterly to per pay period. The file format will have two changes: 
2

a “Pay Period Type Indicator” in the header of your data transmission to allow NFC to better 

identify the pay period; and adding a new data field to the body of data, optional 

Employee/Annuitant Indicator. The optional Employee/Annuitant Indicator will help carriers 

account for persons that are validly enrolled but are not paying any premiums. Examples would be 

annuitants that are in an interim pay status or have their annuities suspended for various reasons, 

or employees where the SF 2809 was forwarded to the carrier without the payroll office arranging 

for payroll deductions of premiums.

A copy of the file format is attached to this BAL. For assistance with the file format and 

transmission of your data, contact NFC’s CLER Operations Unit by calling 504-426-6410 or via 

email at NFC.CLER@nfc.usda.gov. NFC is putting together a small testing group. We need 

payroll offices with biweekly, monthly, and four week pay cycles to participate in this testing 

group. Please contact NFC to register for this testing group.

For policy related questions, contact Mr. Eric Figg in OPM’s Healthcare and Insurance office via 

email at eric.figg@opm.gov.

Sincerely,

John O’Brien

Director 

Healthcare and Insurance