The Office of Legislative
and Public Affairs

Austin Financial Center

Fact Sheets

The Austin Financial Center (RFC) is one of four Treasury Financial Management Service processing centers. The Austin RFC employs 100 people and provides payment services for approximately 80 federal agency sites. The other three RFCs are located in Kansas City, MO, San Francisco, CA, and Philadelphia, PA.

RFCs disburse payments (either electronic funds transfers (EFT) or checks) on behalf of virtually every federal agency in the Executive Branch, except for the Department of Defense and certain independent agencies, such as the U.S. Postal Service.

FMS disburses approximately 85 percent of all federal payments. The regional system was developed to bring agency operations and services closer to its customers.

What We Do

The Austin Financial Center (AFC) is responsible for the disbursement of certified public monies on behalf of over 80 Federal agencies to recipients throughout the United States and other countries where U.S. citizens may be living abroad. The AFC is not only responsible for services within our five-state region, which includes Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, but also provides various services to customers worldwide.

AFC processes claims and inquiries related to EFT payments and government checks that have been returned, lost, or stolen; processes Explanation of Benefits (EOBs) for Department of Veterans Affairs payments, implements and monitors cash/credit management, debt collection, and accounting programs for federal agencies.

In addition to disbursing payments, the Austin Financial Center RFC assists with the collection of delinquent debts owed to the federal government and state governments. The collections are made through the Treasury Offset Program. Under TOP, FMS matches a database of delinquent debtors against payments disbursed by Treasury, then offsets or withholds federal payments to recipients who also owe delinquent debts.

AFC also supports the Financial Management Service (FMS) mission by marketing and promoting FMS products and services. AFC provides technical assistance and serves as a liaison between FMS and Federal program agencies, financial institutions, Federal Reserve Banks, and other customers. AFC provides training on existing and new programs and initiatives through workshops designed to meet the needs of our customers. AFC coordinates and conducts training seminars, Customer Advisory Board Conferences, and Agency Forums, and provides consultation on a full range of FMS programs such as the Secure Payment System (SPS) and Government-wide Accounting (GWA).

The Austin Financial RFC has partnered with other FMS departments to modernize and consolidate more than thirty Department of the Treasury payment applications into one efficient streamlined system.

In fiscal year 2008, the Austin Financial Center issued 170 million payments (excluding stimulus payments), 72 percent of which were EFT, totaling more than $421 billion dollars.

The work at the RFCs has evolved from disbursing handwritten checks to disbursing payments by EFT and printing paper checks using high-speed check printers. In 2008, AFC replaced 30 year old equipment in payment operations with modernized equipment that performs intelligent inserting functions. The KERN 3500 enclosing system is bringing our check processing into the 21st century with added features and total accountability of checks through enclosing.