Negative Adjustment Earnings

[papahotel66]

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

I hope you all have a wonderful Holiday Season and are blessed beyond measure as my family is - So much more than I deserve.

I manage my son's TSP account as well as mine because he is in the Coast Guard and more often than not is engaged in important work during the trading day. His monthly contribution went in yesterday but when I went to update the number of shares in Nasa's tracking spreadsheet the number of C Fund shares had been reduced by a fraction of a share. His contribution was 100% S Fund and no recent IFT's have been made so why would his C Fund shares be reduced? Digging further I found "Negative Adjustment" and "Negative Adjustment Earnings" under the Account Activity - By Date - Menu on the TSP site. Not huge amounts but in the neighborhood of $25 total. When I went to the Fund Activity menu it also showed that his S fund shares had been reduced fractionally after the 11/27 purchase. I could understand somewhat if the reduction amount was the same as his return for the day, but it was over 3% of his contribution. The other part of this that makes me scratch my head is that his account balance as well as his annual return are now even dollar amounts. While mathematically not impossible, I'd have to let Nasa figure the extremely long odds of that.

Anyone else ever experience this? I have over 37 years in the TSP and have never seen it or it has happened and I didn't catch it.

Thanks to Tom and everyone else that contributes to the discourse and education on TSP Talk. It is invaluable and greatly appreciated!

 

[tsptalk]

Thanks. That's interesting, papahotel. I am guilty of not paying close attention to things like that, and while I would hope and assume that nobody is skimming from us, it would be tough to detect unless someone like you dug deep, à la Bernie Madoff.

The fact that you've been checking for 37 years and haven't come across it is comforting, so hopefully nothing has changed.

 

[TommyIV]

It seems to be an accounting tactic to rectify contribution errors such as overpayments or misallocations made by an agency or service payroll office.

 

[nasa1974]

It seems to be an accounting tactic to rectify contribution errors such as overpayments or misallocations made by an agency or service payroll office.

That seems to be a close assessment of what happened. I haven't put money into my TSP account since I retired in 2012 and my numbers have been spot on. I have been in "S" fund for most of that time. I agree it appears to be an agency error that has been corrected.