IG tackles audit of Agriculture job competition

The Agriculture Department's inspector general has agreed to look into a decision to outsource security work at a Maryland research facility.

Last month, two senators asked Agriculture Inspector General Phyllis Fong to review the process department officials used to contract out 24 security guard positions at a Beltsville, Md., research facility. Sens. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., requested an investigation in response to union allegations that Agriculture outsourced the jobs after running a public-private competition fraught with procedural errors.

In an April 9 letter received by Sarbanes' office on Monday, Fong agreed to begin an audit of the competition within 10 days. The inspector general's office does not comment on pending work, a staff member said. Lawmakers asked the IG to focus on calculations comparing the cost of keeping federal guards to that of hiring a contractor.

American Federation of Government Employees officials claim Agriculture officials bent on outsourcing the security jobs inflated the costs of retaining federal employees. "While we understand the need to deliver best value for government services, we also believe that any competition for federal jobs should be fair, transparent and ultimately must demonstrate real cost savings without hindering the critical work done at government installations," Mikulski and Sarbanes wrote in a March 12 letter to Fong.

Staff members from the inspector general's office have visited the Beltsville facility and talked to officials involved in the competition, said Sandy Hays, a spokeswoman for the Agricultural Research Service. "We're more than happy to answer their questions," she said. "We're confident that we did the competition correctly."

But the union is "confident that a thorough and fair investigation into this matter will show significant problems with the special police force privatization," said John Gage, AFGE's president.

AFGE pushed for the IG audit as part of a last-ditch effort to challenge the results of the contest, conducted using streamlined procedures in the Office of Management and Budget's May 2003 version of Circular A-76. The union also filed a protest at the General Accounting Office, but the watchdog agency rejected the case for lack of jurisdiction.

The union on April 8 asked GAO to reconsider the protest. In the meantime, GAO has ruled in five other cases that it cannot accept appeals from federal employees who lose public-private job competitions.

The IG audit could substantiate AFGE's claims that Agriculture ran a flawed competition. But Metropolitan Protective Service Inc., a private security firm based in Landover Hills, Md., took over the work on April 4. Several of the former federal guards accepted jobs with the contractor. Others retired, found alternative government jobs or left the civil service altogether.