Hurricane takes toll on federal payroll facility

The New Orleans finance center that processes paychecks for hundreds of thousands of federal employees is flooded from Hurricane Katrina's aftermath and is unlikely to recover in time for the next pay cycle, an Agriculture Department spokesman said Wednesday.

Checks for the approximately 500,000 employees whose pay is usually processed at Agriculture's National Finance Center will be sent from a backup facility in Philadelphia for the next cycle, said Ed Loyd, a department spokesman. He said he was not sure how many of the center's 1,500 employees are in, or on the way to, Philadelphia.

Some of the relocating employees will not have a home when they return to the New Orleans area, Loyd added. "A lot who are there or are on the way...basically all they have is their suitcases," he said.

Meanwhile, the finance center's Web site remained down while agency employees switched online services to Kansas City, where Agriculture runs an information technology center. The malfunction is "part of some of the IT difficulties in transferring everything," Loyd said.

Loyd had no further information on why the site is down, and was not able to say when it will be back up.