Agencies Paid Hundreds
of Employees to Not Work for at Least One Year
Federal agencies from
fiscal 2011 to fiscal 2013 paid 263 employees at least one full year’s salary to
sit on the sidelines and not work, and paid an additional 57,000 federal workers
at least one month’s salary to stay home.
A Government
Accountability Office report released on Monday found the government spent a
total of $3.1 billion in the three-year period on salaries for employees on paid
administrative leave, which is meant to be used primarily while investigating
employees’ alleged misconduct. Of that total, agencies spent $700 million for
employees on administrative leave for at least one month, and $31 million for
employees paid to not work for at least one year.
There is no general
statutory authority for the use of paid administrative leave, GAO said, but the
auditing agency and the Office of Personnel Management have issued guidance to
agencies to manage its use. OPM has provided examples for when administrative
leave is appropriate, such as unavoidable tardiness of less than one hour, for
hourly wage-grade employees and cases of adverse personnel actions. In the “rare
circumstances” employees present a threat to the workplace, the possibility of
damaging government property, or would “otherwise jeopardize legitimate
government interests,” agencies can place the employees on paid administrative
leave. Agencies often invoke their right to use this type of leave after
providing advance notice of a suspension or firing.
Essentially,
administrative leave allows agencies to take employees off the job without
punishing them in a way that violates due process or is appealable to entities
such as the Merit Systems Protection Board. This enables agencies to conduct
investigations into alleged wrongdoing.
This has frequently
drawn the ire of lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who say the policy allows malfeasant
feds to take paid vacations while their cases are sifted through the bloated and
bottlenecked federal bureaucracy. The GAO report was requested by Republican
oversight leaders in Congress, namely Sens. Chuck Grassley, Iowa, and Tom
Coburn, Okla., as well as Rep. Darrell Issa, Calif.
“The GAO report offers
new details on the extent to which federal agencies are granting employees --
included those facing disciplinary action -- taxpayer-funded vacations for
extended periods of time,” said Issa, who chairs the House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee, in a statement to Government Executive. “Gross
overuse of paid administrative leave wastes taxpayer funds and underscores
dysfunctional agency management that often prefers to dither on personnel
problems rather than expeditiously resolve them.”
GAO was able to access
administrative leave data through OPM’s Enterprise Human Resources Integration
payroll system. OPM has never provided guidance on how to quantify admin leave,
however, and agencies therefore use differing definitions. Some payroll
providers, for example, count paid federal holidays as paid administrative
leave. Others count paid absences specifically authorized by Congress --
including post-organ donation recovery, official time, attending law enforcement
funerals and rehabilitation from injuries suffered while serving abroad -- as
admin leave, even though OPM has said they should not be included in the
tally.
After excluding federal
holidays from the data, agencies provided employees with a total of 9.94 million
days of paid administrative leave between fiscal years 2011 and 2013, or about
five days per employee. About 3 percent of the federal workforce charged at
least one month of administrative leave, while 69 employees charged between 1.5
and three years.
About 77 percent of the
salary costs associated with paid admin leave went to employees who took 20 days
or less. At an organization like the U.S. Agency for International Development,
this could simply be the grace period relocated employees have to adjust to
their new posts. Still, nearly one in four federal dollars spent on paid
administrative leave went to long-term users, most likely those who were facing
a negative action from their agency.
Other reasons agencies
provided to GAO for authorizing administrative leave included physical-fitness
related activities, vacation and professional development.
In its report, GAO
called paid admin leave an important tool for agencies, but said it must be
“managed effectively.” GAO also recommended OPM create governmentwide standards
for administrative leave reporting, so the information does not lead to
“decisions based on faulty conclusions that stem from inaccurate data.”
OPM agreed to form a
working group in 2015 to establish such guidance.
