To complete and submit SF 1081, the Voucher and Schedule of Withdrawals and Credits, a federal agency fills in matching Agency Location Codes and appropriation symbols for the billing and customer sides, writes a specific description of why the funds are moving, obtains an authorizing signature, and processes the transfer through the Intra-governmental Payment and Collection (IPAC) system. The current PDF, revised September 1982, is hosted by the General Services Administration and draws its authority from Treasury Financial Manual section 2-2500. One deadline to plan around: the Bureau of the Fiscal Service is turning off direct IPAC access for buy/sell settlements on October 1, 2025, moving those settlements to G-Invoicing.
When SF 1081 Is the Right Form
SF 1081 handles intra-governmental transactions — money that stays inside the federal government. Two situations account for most vouchers. The first is one agency billing another for services rendered, supplies shipped, or shared administrative costs on a joint project. The second is accounting corrections: reversing or reclassifying an entry that was charged to the wrong appropriation or booked at the wrong amount.
The form is not for payments to outside vendors or contractors. It operates in a checkless environment where funds move through ledger adjustments at the Treasury level, so no commercial banking channel is involved.
Be careful with the correction use case. A Department of Defense Inspector General audit found that 34 of 100 sampled SF 1081 transactions were unnecessary reclassifications from temporary holding accounts, and another 6 were manual reallocations the accounting system could have handled automatically at the time of the original entry. Use the form for genuine corrections, not as a workaround for sloppy initial recording.
Filling In the Form
SF 1081 is a single page: identification fields at the top, a transaction summary in the middle, authorization at the bottom. The top half has mirrored columns, one for the customer agency (being billed) and one for the billing agency (initiating the charge).
Agency Identification
Each side of the form needs three items:
- Agency Location Code (ALC), an eight-digit number unique to each federal office. The billing agency credits its own ALC and charges the customer agency’s ALC. A digit error sends funds to or from the wrong account.
- Voucher number, the internal tracking number each agency assigns for its own records. Both sides fill in their respective numbers.
- Department name for each agency involved.
Appropriation and Fund Symbols
The summary section has debit and credit columns. Each requires an Appropriation, Fund, or Receipt Symbol and a dollar amount. Treasury assigns these symbols so every dollar ties back to the specific law that authorized the spending. A wrong symbol can charge money against a budget Congress never authorized for that purpose, so check both symbols against your agency’s accounting records before submitting.
Details of Transaction
This is the narrative field explaining why the money is moving. Vague descriptions like “prior year adjustment” get flagged by reviewers and auditors. Answer the obvious questions in a sentence or two: What was the original transaction? When did it occur? Why does it need correcting or reimbursing? If the transfer reimburses one agency for services provided to another, name the interagency agreement or order number. Specific descriptions reduce the chance the voucher gets kicked back during validation.
Authorization
The authorizing official’s printed name, title, phone number, and signature go at the bottom. The signature confirms the transfer has cleared the agency’s internal chain of command and that funds are available. Legible contact information matters: the receiving agency will call this number when it has questions, and missing details slow resolution.
Submitting Through IPAC
Once the form is complete, the transaction moves through IPAC, Treasury’s centralized platform for transferring funds between federal agencies. IPAC processes transfers in real time with standardized descriptive data attached to each one.
You can get an SF 1081 into IPAC two ways. Agency staff can enter the data manually through the online system, or an accounting or disbursing system can generate transactions automatically for bulk transfer. Either path, IPAC assigns each transaction a unique Document Reference Number (DRN), the electronic equivalent of a Treasury check number, so no two transactions share an identifier.
When the billing agency initiates a collection, it credits its own ALC and charges the customer agency’s ALC in the same step. The customer agency then validates the transaction by cross-referencing the appropriation symbols and amounts against its own budget records. If everything matches, the agency accepts the transaction and Treasury’s general ledger updates automatically. If the customer agency spots a wrong amount, a mismatched appropriation symbol, or missing documentation, the transaction goes back to the billing agency for correction and resubmission.
Errors That Get Vouchers Rejected
The 2021 DoD Inspector General audit found 55 out of 100 sampled SF 1081 entries were problematic. The failures broke into three groups:
- Unnecessary reclassifications, 34 of 100. Agencies used the form to move transactions out of temporary holding accounts when the entries should have been booked correctly the first time.
- Unnecessary manual reallocations, 6 of 100. Cost reallocations the accounting system could have processed automatically.
- Missing supporting documentation, 15 of 100. DFAS personnel could not produce evidence to support the transactions, so auditors could not verify whether the corrections were necessary or accurate.
The documentation gaps were the most serious finding. Without an audit trail tying each SF 1081 to the original transaction it corrects, auditors cannot confirm the entry is valid. Agencies running multiple disbursement, general ledger, and feeder systems often lack a centralized inventory of their SF 1081 transactions, which compounds the problem at year-end reconciliation.
Records To Keep for Audit
Every SF 1081 becomes part of your agency’s permanent financial history. The DoD Financial Management Regulation requires agencies to maintain a complete population of all SF 1081 transactions along with supporting documentation for any corrections, sufficient for auditors to verify each transaction was necessary and accurate.
The practical demand is monthly reconciliation. Agencies must match their individual Fund Balance With Treasury (FBWT) accounts against the balance Treasury maintains on their behalf. SF 1081 records, together with the underlying invoices, interagency agreements, and correction justifications, are the primary evidence auditors review when testing whether an agency’s books align with Treasury’s. Both the Government Accountability Office and agency-level inspectors general rely on these records during annual financial statement audits.
Organize the supporting paperwork by transaction, not by date. When an auditor pulls a single entry, you should be able to produce the original transaction it corrects, the authorization chain, and the rationale for the adjustment without digging through unrelated filings.
What Changes on October 1, 2025
Fiscal Service is turning off direct IPAC access for buy/sell settlements at the start of fiscal year 2026. Federal entities were already required to use G-Invoicing for new orders with a performance period beginning October 1, 2022, or later. After October 1, 2025, settlement requests for buy/sell transactions must flow through G-Invoicing, which then validates them through IPAC rather than agencies reaching IPAC on their own.
G-Invoicing does not eliminate the underlying documentation requirements. The system still validates settlement requests through IPAC, and agencies still need correct appropriation symbols, ALCs, and transaction descriptions. What changes is the workflow: G-Invoicing adds order management and performance reporting layers that should reduce the after-the-fact corrections SF 1081 was historically used to clean up. If your agency currently leans on SF 1081 for reclassifications and retroactive adjustments, treat the transition as a prompt to fix upstream recording problems rather than carry the same habits into the new system.