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Beat This Sick Leave Record

February 26, 2007

Fedblog

Former editor in chief

So he not only accumulated literally years worth of leave, but refused to be paid for it when he retired in order that other feds might benefit from it. Oh, and one other thing: Reckert was blind his entire life. (Thanks to the reader who clued me in to Reckert's story.) An alert reader notes the following: "While this makes a good story, it can't be true. Federal employees can only donate annual leave, not sick leave. So there was no mechanism for Mr. Reckert to donate his sick leave. It is also true that he couldn't get paid for it. Sick leave is added to service time for the calculation of a pension. However, the pension is capped at 80% of salary, which is reached after about 42 years of service, so Mr. Reckert basically lost his sick leave."

Now for the latest on the sick leave challenge. Whoever is the current leader, it will be difficult to top the achievement of William Reckert, who died in April 2005 after more than 50 years in government. Here's the key part of his story, as it appeared in his obituary in the Washington Post:

Mr. Reckert began his career in the federal government in 1951 as a medical transcriber for the Veterans Administration, moving to the Justice Department five years later. When he retired with 53 years of federal service, a year and a day before his death, he had accumulated 5,500 hours of unused sick leave, which his son said he donated for use by other federal employees.
His work included projects for U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, witness interrogations for the Justice Department's civil fraud division, the antitrust division's IBM case and the Watergate special prosecution team.

His family said he discovered the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap as he typed the June 20, 1972, secret recording of an Oval Office conversation between President Richard Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman.

Update, 6:45 p.m.:

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