Losing Their Religion

Until their retirement a few years ago, John Sirmalis and Juergen Keil, the two top executives at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I., dedicated decades of their lives to federal service. They worked long hours week in and week out, much as executives across government are expected to do. Like all members of the federal Senior Executive Service, Sirmalis and Keil didn't get overtime pay. They didn't get to use compensatory time the way lower-level employees could.

But they discovered that they could take a special type of time off called "religious compensatory time." In general, federal employees and executives who need to take time for religious observances such as Yom Kippur for Jews and Ash Wednesday for Catholics can use religious comp time, as long as they make it up.

Sirmalis and Keil seemed to think it was OK to use religious comp time as if it were regular comp time.

From 1995 to 1999, Sirmalis took no vacation. In 2000, he took just four hours of vacation time. During those six years, he instead took 682 hours of religious comp time, or an average of 113.7 hours a year. He often took the religious comp time just before or after three-day weekends, for a week at a time, or when his schedule said he had medical appointments or golf tournaments.

Keil, similarly, took no vacation time from 1995 to 2000, except for 40 hours in 1997. Instead, he took 654 hours of religious comp time over those six years, or an average of 109 hours a year. On days he took religious comp time, Keil ran a marathon in Alaska, went sightseeing in Germany and moved into a new house, according to the review of his desktop calendar by inspector general investigators.

When the investigators asked Sirmalis whether he was working overtime and having it documented as religious comp time, Sirmalis said, "You've got it. I can choose what [bin] I want to put it in, can't I? Absolutely right. If I'm working overtime and don't get paid for overtime, then I pick what [bin] I want to put it in. I can't get credit hours. So I'll fill up the religious comp time bin because that's something that I choose to use when appropriate and when I desire to use it." Asked whether golf tournaments could be considered religious observances, Sirmalis replied, "They could be for some people."

By using the religious comp time rather than vacation, the two executives stored up thousands of hours of annual leave that is worth money at retirement-$250,141 worth for Sirmalis and $195,650 for Keil. They seemed to think they had earned it.

It appears that the Navy center had an atmosphere of permissiveness when it came to religious comp time. The inspector general found that 20 percent of the center's employees used religious comp time, with little correlation to religious observances on a typical interfaith calendar. Comparatively, only 3 percent of employees at other Navy units took religious comp time, usually on days when religious observances actually occurred, the inspector general investigation found.

After the review, the inspector general decided the facts of the case "suggested a premeditated, conspiratorial effort to defraud the government." Sirmalis and Keil were forced to retire and their annual leave windfall was revoked. Lower-ranking executives who also had taken advantage of religious comp time received lesser punishments.

Sirmalis and Keil served the government for much of their lives. The Navy decided not to make their case public. Months after the Navy inspector general's office completed its investigative report, the Navy refused to release it and refused to comment on disciplinary action taken against the executives, citing the Privacy Act.

The story disappeared until this spring, when the whistleblower who alerted Navy officials to the comp time issue wrote about his experience in Breakthroughs, a journal published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology security studies program. Peter Duffy, the whistleblower, felt the executives got preferential treatment. "When you blow the whistle on executives," he said, "it's different from when you blow the whistle on rank-and-files."

As in the Navy's case, takers of religious comp time need to ask themselves how far the rules can be bent before they break. Even at the top, senior executives must answer to a higher authority.