UPDATE January 3, 2025 1:45 p.m.:

On November 4, the Division of Retirement and Benefits (Division) was notified by the Office of Information Technology (OIT) that unexpected activity was noted on the Division’s servers and all access to the State network and the servers had been severed until the issue could be investigated. The investigation process took approximately three weeks before the Division once again had connectivity. The Division’s data was not accessed, viewed, or exported, so no breach of information occurred. Due to the time it would take to restore and rebuild the servers and the requirement for the Division to move its programs and applications to the cloud, it was determined to complete the migration to the cloud that had started earlier in the year. All applications successfully migrated to the cloud with the exception of e-Reporting and Employer Services. Both applications are the means by which employers report contributions to the plans. Employer Services is designed to report contributions of the two largest employers in the plans, The State of Alaska and the Municipality of Anchorage. This reporting tool has been successfully migrated and is operational for those employers.

All other participating employers use e-Reporting as it accommodates the more manual entry required by the smaller employers. It was discovered that e-Reporting would need additional updates before it was migrated to the cloud. The Division continues to work with the vendor that created it and is updating e-Reporting to get the application operational as soon as possible.

In the interim, the Division has a work-around which allows employers to submit their contributions to the plans. Because the work-around requires training of employer payroll staff to use and requires more manual work, Division payroll staff is contacting employers to set up times to walk them through the reporting process. This can be more time-consuming, but the Division is processing payrolls. Some employers have elected to wait until e-reporting is online.

The vendor informed the department that e-Reporting should be in the final testing phase hopefully next week.

Original post:

The Division is aware of the problem with e-Reporting, the retirement contribution reporting system. This issue is related to the outage experienced in November. Because of the outage, the Division had to move all systems and applications to a cloud environment. During the migration process, it was discovered that e-Reporting needed to be upgraded to operate in that environment. The Division had plans to migrate the system to the cloud at a later date, but the earlier transition was forced by the outage.

The Division does have a workaround for employers to report contributions. However, it involves manual input for both the employer and Division staff. Employer payrolls are still being processed and contributions are being sent to Empower for deposit into participant accounts, however the manual process is much slower.

The updated e-Reporting system should soon have the necessary security approvals so testing can begin. Once testing is completed, e-Reporting will be back online and ready to receive employer payrolls for processing. We currently anticipate it will be back online by January 15th.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue.