The Office of Legislative
and Public Affairs

Fact Sheets

Philadelphia Regional Financial Center

The Philadelphia Financial Center (RFC) is one of four Treasury Financial Management Service processing centers. The Philadelphia RFC employs about 190 people. The other three RFCs are located in Austin, TX; Kansas City, MO; and San Francisco, CA.

RFCs disburse payments (either electronic funds transfers (EFT) or check) 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. In fact, FMS disburses approximately 85 percent of all federal payments.

Federal payments FMS disburses include: Social Security benefits; Supplemental Security Income; federal pension benefits; veterans' compensation, pension, and education benefits; Railroad Retirement Board benefits; federal income tax refunds, and other federal disbursements such as salary and vendor payments. The RFCs also perform other payment-related services including EFT and check claims and reclamations, cancellation of returned checks, and processing agencies' requests for recovery of payments issued after a payee is deceased.

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. Since November 2000, the Philadelphia RFC has been printing paper checks on high-speed laser printers that can print more than 60,000 checks per hour, compared with the 12,000 check-per-hour printing capabilities of its impact printers. The Philadelphia RFC currently has three laser printers in operation. The digital printing and verification systems, combined in the laser printer, take the process of check and payment-related document printing to a new level of confidence and accuracy.

In addition to disbursing payments, RFCs assist with the collection of delinquent debts owed to the federal government and to state governments. The collections are made through the Treasury Offset Program, a system under which the names and taxpayer identifying numbers of debtors included in an FMS database are matched against the names and taxpayer identifying numbers of recipients of federal payments. If there are matches, the amounts of the payments are reduced, or offset, to satisfy the delinquent debts.