Employment History Data Overflow

The Employment History Extract process was recently modified to provide options for including or excluding transactions for students (A98), special consultants (A54) and separated employees. Choosing to include those transactions when creating absolute or relative type files may increase the likelihood of employees with data overflow.

Data overflow occurs when the volume of history extracted for an individual employee exceeds the maximum record length allowed (31748 bytes). Employees with data overflow have a value of X for the field, XX:OVERFLOW and will be missing transactions for the specified time-frame.

Always check your EH file for employees with data overflow if:

You extracted data for a large time-frame (e.g., 12 months or more).
Your extract file includes transactions for students, special consultants and separated employees.

If you identify an employee with data overflow, and you need to see all transactions for that employee, you must generate multiple extract files for that SSN using smaller time-frames. For example, instead of creating an EH extract file that spans 3 years, try creating two extract files that span 18 months each.