If you retired tomorrow, would you get a fat check from your agency for all those vacation days you never took? According to new regulations published by the Office of Personnel Management, it all depends on where you work, when you work, and when you retire.
The final regs, published in the July 8 Federal Register, should help decipher the rules for calculating retiring employees' lump-sum payments for annual and accrued leave. OPM compiled the rules after agencies and labor organizations agreed that such regulations need to be consistent throughout the federal government. The final regulations include adjustments made to rules originally proposed in July 1997.
Federal employees are entitled to a lump-sum payment upon retirement from federal service or when military duty calls. The only other situation in which feds can get that money is when unused annual leave cannot be transferred to or credited at another agency.
One of the major changes from the original proposed rules affects lump-sum payments for employees with irregular work schedules, such as full-time work part of the year and sporadic work the remainder. Under the proposed rules, employees with irregular work schedules could not have received lump-sum payments for accumulated annual leave. Agencies would have been required to hold accrued leave during intermittent work until the employee returned to full or part-time employment. But one agency pointed out that some of its employees rely on the lump-sum payments between mixed tours of duty. Another agency commented that making the payments for short periods of work would cause an undue administrative burden. So, OPM has left it up to each agency to develop its own policy.
If an employee has annual leave that expires shortly after a scheduled retirement, that leave is included in the lump-sum payment. Such "use or lose" leave must be included when projecting the lump-sum leave period, the final regs state.
The rules also spell out how accrued annual leave pay is calculated, with adjustments for things like night, Sunday and overtime pay. For the truly confused, OPM offers a sample calculation for a fictitious firefighter with uncommon work hours. Examples on how to recredit annual leave when an employee returns to federal service are also provided.
Final regulations only apply to lump-sum payments paid out on or after September 7, 1999, and are not retroactive.
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