DHS pushes pay-for-performance back a year

The Homeland Security Department announced Wednesday that it will delay implementation of its new pay-for-performance system for some employees by a year.

Employees who are part of the first wave of personnel reform will not receive their first performance-based pay raises until January 2008. That group consists of workers from DHS headquarters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, according to DHS.

Those employees were originally scheduled to enter the performance-based pay system in early 2006, giving them a year of reviews for which to base their January 2007 raises. The new pay system would replace the General Schedule for DHS employees.

The affected employees will now join those from the Coast Guard and the Secret Service who already were scheduled to be inducted into the new pay system in January 2007, and receive their first performance-based paychecks in January 2008.

The remainder of the department's employees, those in the Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services bureaus, will proceed along the planned schedule, entering the performance review portion in early 2008 with the first performance-based raises in 2009.

DHS announced this delay as part of a daily e-mail update. Officials said the delay "continues to recognize the importance of solid performance management to the accomplishment of DHS' mission while recognizing that the quality of our performance management and the ability of our managers to implement it should be demonstrated before pay is linked to performance."

This change will not affect the labor relations portion of DHS' new personnel regulations, which were ruled illegal by a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Aug. 12. DHS is awaiting the judge's decision on whether a new labor relations plan that DHS submitted after the verdict is acceptable.

In response to the delay, the National Treasury Employees Union, which led four other unions in filing the lawsuit against DHS' labor relations regulations, said the change is a "step in the right direction" but "is not enough."

NTEU said it called for the delay last week during a series of meetings with DHS officials in which "agency contractors presented proposed performance work standards for various work competencies." NTEU said its representatives strongly criticized the proposed standards as being "totally out of touch with the realities of the workplace."

DHS officials said the flexibilities built into their proposed personnel rules "remain critical to DHS mission accomplishment and our goal of creating a 21st-century department."

NTEU president Colleen Kelley said in a statement that she is "pleased to see that DHS agrees that it is nowhere near ready to begin moving on this unwise proposal."