Cal OES MARS — Mutual-Aid Reimbursement
California fire agencies that respond under the California Fire Assistance Agreement (CFAA) are reimbursed through Cal OES's Mutual Aid Reimbursement System (MARS): an annual Salary Survey, Administrative Rate and Attachment A submission, an F-5 resource inventory, then an F-42 and expense claim per resource order, an invoice Cal OES generates, and a payment from the paying entity. This module prepares all of it from the deployment's roster, daily time reports and expenses, checks it against the portal's rules, and gives you a side-by-side handoff view to type into MARS.
Resgrid stores no MARS credentials, MFA tokens or browser sessions and never writes to MARS. Submission is a manual, audited step you perform in the portal; afterwards a manager records what the portal shows (Observed in MARS). Cal OES determines the allowed amount — the expected reimbursement here is an estimate from the rates and agreement in effect at dispatch.
Business Ops add-on with CostRecovery.CalOesMars. Menu: Workforce & Business Ops → Cal OES MARS. Managers (administrators or Manage Cal OES MARS reimbursement) get the readiness dashboard; rostered members get their own action queue and can draft an F-42 for a deployment they are on.
Readiness dashboard
Pick a check date (a dispatch date) and the dashboard lists blockers (stop new F-42s from reaching Ready for portal) and warnings, each with a Fix link: no agency profile or an unverified one, no annual submission covering the date, no agreement, F-5 mismatches, an authority profile that no longer covers the date. Below: the annual submissions in effect, the agency card (Edit agency, Mark verified today), at-a-glance counts (F-5 resources and mismatches, agreements, open work items, returned items, invoices awaiting local approval) and links to the official sources and the MARS portal.
Setting up (once a year)
1. Agency profile
Cal OES MARS → Agency: agency name, MACS designator, category, contact, address, FEIN, SAM UEI, SAM registration, FI$Cal supplier, portal role and a label for the portal account (never a password). These values are copied onto every F-42 and claim. Mark verified after comparing with the agency record in MARS; changing an identifier clears the verification and the dashboard warns after a year.
2. F-5 resource inventory
Cal OES MARS → Resources: the crosswalk from your units and assets to their MARS / F-5 identity. Draft from units copies each unit's name, plate and VIN; add the resource type, kind, designator, serial, ownership (local agency, Cal OES, CAL FIRE, private, rental), effective window and, once the portal shows it, the MARS resource id via Record observation. Review states: Draft → Reviewed → Observed, or Mismatch when what MARS shows differs. The F-42 flags apparatus that is Not in the F-5 resource inventory.
3. Annual rates
Cal OES MARS → Rates: one submission per type and year — Salary Survey, Attachment A (non-suppression), Administrative Rate, Cal OES Rate Letter, Special Equipment / FEMA codes — with its effective window, source URL/date/checksum and status Draft → Reviewed → Signed locally → Submitted in MARS → Accepted (or Superseded by a newer snapshot). An earlier dispatch keeps the submission in effect when it started.
| Panel | Use |
|---|---|
| Rate lines | Salary lines need a classification; equipment lines a resource or FEMA code; each has a basis (hourly, daily, per mile, percent, flat), straight and overtime rate, portal-to-portal and overtime eligibility, and whether workers' comp / unemployment insurance are included. Build from workforce pay data (with the Workforce module) fills the straight and overtime rates with the mean of the approved individual hourly rates per classification — aggregates only, a review aid; the authorized representative still signs in MARS. Cal OES base rate accepted skips your own survey rows. |
| Administrative-rate inputs | Prior-year actuals by function and category, classified direct / indirect / unallowable, with a billed directly to an incident exclusion and a possible double count marker that must be resolved. Budgets never enter here. |
| Administrative-rate worksheet | Build administrative rate: allowable indirect ÷ allowable direct from the accepted inputs, compared with the de-minimis option (10 %); choose the method. |
4. Agreements
Cal OES MARS → Agreements: the approved MOU / MOA / GBR compensation methods — actual hours or portal-to-portal, overtime after 8 or 12 hours or per agreement — per classification or department-wide, with a window and optionally the signed document uploaded as a deployment attachment. An F-42 selects the agreement in effect at initial dispatch; an agreement referenced by a submitted record is immutable (editing creates a new version).
Per incident
5. The action queue
Cal OES MARS → Queue: F-42s, expense claims and MARS invoices grouped by deployment with their local state, checklist result, observed status, expected amount and age. Prepare a record picks a cost-recovery deployment and builds an F-42 — one per ordered resource / request (give the request or fill id when a Records order has several); a redispatch supersedes the earlier one — or an expense claim linked to an F-42 or on the travel-only path.
6. The F-42 work item
The page follows the official box order: responding agency (MACS designator), incident (order number, request number, redispatch of, resource type, strike team / task force, reporting location, overhead position), dispatch / commitment and return / redispatch times (release is not return — the F-42 needs the return or redispatch time), apparatus / support vehicles / equipment (kind, designator, resource code, hours, miles, odometer), personnel (name, rank, classification, committed hours and actual hours from the DTRs), crew rotations with approval attachments, comments / loss-damage / supply numbers, signatures (responding agency signer, incident / AREP authorizer, or Documentation only) and attachments. Every value links to the immutable deployment facts it came from.
Then, in order:
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| Run checklist | Validates against the portal rules (missing return time, unsigned F-42 attachment, no agreement, apparatus not in F-5 …). A clean checklist moves the record to Ready for portal; errors leave it at Needs review. |
| Calculate | Expected reimbursement from the rates and agreement in effect at initial dispatch; a missing rate becomes an Excluded line with the reason, never a silent zero. No internal cost enters these lines. |
| Open handoff view | After ticking the attestation (I am the authorized person entering this record in MARS), a side-by-side copy view — box, value, source, Copy — for manual entry in the portal. Not stored, not cached, not a submission; opening it writes an audit entry only. Evidence packet downloads the supporting documents as a zip (it is not a MARS import file). |
| Record submission observed in MARS | The MARS record id and observed status → Observed in MARS (Cal OES review). Later observations move it to Returned for agency review (closes the revision and opens a new one with the reviewer's comment), Approved, Pending local agency approval, Pending paying entity or Paid. |
| Close | Archives a finished item. |
Field crews can draft and validate the F-42 from the Responder, Unit and Incident Command apps; the handoff and every observation stay on the web.
7. Invoices and payments
Cal OES MARS → Reconciliation: Record a MARS invoice as you see it in the portal — MARS invoice id, date, invoiced total, paying entity, observed status and the submitted records it covers. The invoice page compares expected versus observed with the variance, takes the local decision (approve, or reject with a comment, by name / title — recorded here, entered in MARS by you), and Record payment (paid on, reference, paying-entity status) marks the invoice and its records Paid — only ever from an observed payment.
A MARS invoice is a work item, never a customer invoice: no invoice number, no aging, no e-mail or online payment.
Reminders
The daily reminder digest to administrators covers: annual Salary Survey / Administrative Rate submissions expiring, agreements expiring, resources released without a ready or submitted F-42 (due 14 days after release by default), expense claims missing evidence, records returned for review, and MARS invoices awaiting local approval. It never submits, approves, picks a rate or changes an observed state.
Setup examples
| Organization | How to use it |
|---|---|
| California municipal / county fire | Full cycle: agency profile verified each January, F-5 drafted from units, Salary Survey built from Workforce pay data, agreements per classification, F-42 per strike-team request, expense claims for lodging and meals, reconciliation of every MARS invoice. |
| California fire district (volunteer) | Same, with Cal OES base rate accepted instead of a survey and Documentation only F-42s for non-reimbursable responses. |
| CAL FIRE cooperator / contract county | Attachment A (non-suppression) submissions; agreements per MOU. |
| Out-of-state agency on a California assignment | Not MARS — use the deployment's DTR PDFs and time CSV for the EMAC reimbursement package. |
Technical reference
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Routes | /User/CalOesMars/{Index,Agency,Resources,Rates,Rate,Agreements,Queue,WorkItem,Handoff,Print,Packet,Reconciliation,Invoice} and their POST actions (SaveAgency, VerifyAgency, BuildResources, ObserveResource, SaveRate, SaveRateLines, SaveAdministrativeInputs, BuildAdministrativeRate, BuildSalarySurvey, SetRateStatus, ObserveRate, SaveAgreement, ObserveAgreement, BuildF42, BuildExpense, SaveF42, Validate, Calculate, ObserveSubmission, ObserveStatus, RecordInvoice, DecideInvoice, RecordPayment, Close) |
| Model | Core/Resgrid.Model/CostRecovery/CalOesMars/ — agency profile, resource profiles (F-5), rate profiles + lines + administrative inputs, agreement snapshots, work items (F-42, expense claim, generated invoice) with revisions; CalOesMarsAuthorityProfile (reviewed code/data contract CFAA-2026-08-21: box order, request prefixes, status maps, 10 % de-minimis) |
| States | CalOesMarsLocalStates: Draft, NeedsReview, ReadyForPortal, SubmittedExternal, ReturnedForAgencyReview, Approved, DocumentationOnly, PendingLocalAgencyApproval, LocalAgencyRejected, PendingPayingEntityApproval, Paid, Closed |
| Permission | Manage Cal OES MARS reimbursement (79; claim actions view / update / submit / reconcile); rostered members prepare their own drafts without it |
| Config | CostRecoveryConfig: CalOesMarsPortalUrl, F42DueDaysAfterRelease 14, AnnualDeadlineLeadDays 45, AgreementExpiryLeadDays 30, HandoffAttestationRequired |
| Worker | 32 DeploymentFinanceReminderLogic MARS duties (daily) |
| Services | ICalOesMarsService, pure ICalOesMarsReimbursementCalculator, ManualCalOesMarsGateway (zero external writes) |
| API | api/v4/CalOesMars/* (queue, F-42 draft/validate for the apps) |