How can reporters distinguish VA contractors from federal employees in public payroll datasets and agency disclosures?
Executive summary
Reporters can reliably separate Veterans Affairs (VA) federal employees from contractors only by tracking the data source: personnel/payroll datasets derived from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) or VA’s internal PAID system represent federal employees, while procurement, contractor self‑reporting and private payroll records represent contractors; failure to check provenance routinely produces false positives because many public salary aggregators ingest OPM data that explicitly excludes contractors [1] [2] [3].
1. Understand the master lists: OPM/FedScope and VA’s PAID contain employees, not contractors
The authoritative public snapshots of federal civilian payroll come from OPM’s Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI) warehouse and FedScope, which provide “on‑board” employee records and do not include contractors; those data are the basis for many salary lookup tools and are the primary way to identify bona fide federal employees [2] [1]. VA’s internal Personnel and Accounting Integrated Data (PAID) is a person‑level payroll and HR dataset that similarly holds employee pay and time data for VA staff, and it presents a richer, confidential employee‑level view that still excludes contractor personnel because PAID is an employee payroll system [3].
2. Watch for the absence of contractors: why omission is a signal, not a bug
Multiple authoritative sources explicitly exclude contractors from federal employee counts and pay datasets — the Congressional Budget Office treats contractors as private‑sector workers for compensation comparisons, and OPM/FedScope figures do not count contractor headcount or pay — so records derived from those systems should be treated as employee‑only unless the publisher says otherwise [4] [2]. Therefore, a missing name or pay line in EHRI/FederalPay‑style exports is consistent with contractor status but is not definitive proof — it’s a necessary but not sufficient signal [1].
3. Use complementary procurement and contractor reporting to confirm contractors
To flip the coin, seek procurement records, contractor award databases and contractor reporting: federal contracting vehicles, vendor invoices, and statutory contractor disclosures (such as the veteran‑employment reports hosted on Data.gov) capture private firms and their staff working for VA, and those sources are where contractor pay and headcount will appear rather than in OPM-derived payrolls [5]. Reporters should cross‑check an individual’s absence from EHRI/PAID with contract award documents or vendor rosters; if a person appears on a contractor payroll aggregator but not in OPM/PAID, that is strong evidence of contractor status [6] [7].
4. Look for metadata and fields that reveal employer type
Practical dataset markers include the dataset provenance field (OPM vs procurement system), employer/payor name (e.g., “Department of Veterans Affairs” as employer for employees versus a private company name for contractors), and fund/accounting codes: PAID and EHRI include job series and federal funding control points, whereas contractor records typically reference contract numbers and agency award offices in procurement systems [3] [1]. Public aggregators sometimes conceal these distinctions, so the raw file or original OPM/PAID export is the gold standard for verification [8] [1].
5. Beware of aggregation pitfalls, incentives and misinterpretation
Watchdog websites and salary search tools aggregate EHRI data to create searchable interfaces, but these tools inherit OPM’s employee‑only scope and can create confusion when used to claim contractor pay is “federal” — either through sloppy language or political framing [8] [1]. Conversely, policy analyses that treat contractors as private‑sector workers for compensation comparisons reflect a deliberate methodological choice (CBO) that can mask the government’s total labor cost if reporters aren’t explicit about definitions [4].
6. Best‑practice checklist for verification on deadline
On deadline, first confirm the dataset source (OPM/FedScope or VA PAID = employee; procurement/VETS/contractor filings = contractor) and search the individual in EHRI/PAID exports; second, check contract award databases or Data.gov contractor reports for the vendor and contract number; third, use payroll aggregators only to surface leads and always corroborate with the original federal data feeds or procurement records; finally, disclose dataset limits in any reporting because public payroll datasets often omit contractor pay by design [1] [3] [5].