Agencies ask for money to fund raises and bonuses

Federal managers have neither the budgets nor the flexibility to design attractive pay and benefits packages for hiring and retaining employees, witnesses told a Senate panel Tuesday.

The hearing was the fourth in a series on the federal workforce held by the Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, Restructuring and the District of Columbia.

Asked by subcommittee chairman Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, whether the federal government's current incentives are enough to recruit and retain the best and brightest, witnesses agreed that the answer was no.

Roberta Gross, NASA's inspector general, described her frustrations with trying to hire staff for her office's Computer Crime Division. According to Gross, plenty of people want to work for the division. "It's like the Chicago Bulls" for computer security, she explained. Nonetheless, several candidates have turned down her job offers because the allure of the private sector-with its higher salaries and generous benefits-was too great.

Gross also lamented the fact that it takes at least three months for her to bring a candidate on board, despite the delegated personnel authority her office has from the Office of Personnel Management. The lengthy hiring process "always boggles me," she said.

Gross said her top priorities for improving federal recruitment and retention include limited noncompetitive hiring authority for hard-to-fill positions, the authority to give long-term bonuses instead of lump-sum awards and pay banding. Pay banding differs from the General Schedule by allowing employees to move noncompetitively within a range of salaries, based on their performance.

"My key theme is flexibility," Gross said. The IG Office would welcome audits to ensure that, given such flexibilities, it was still complying with the principles of the federal merit system, she said.

Henry Romero, the Office of Personnel Management's associate director for workforce compensation and performance, described a long litany of tools available to agencies to attract and retain workers. But Romero admitted that the overall use of pay-related authorities, such as recruitment and retention bonuses, is low. In 1998, for example, only 1,089 recruitment bonuses were given governmentwide. OPM is looking at ways to make the authorities more flexible, and therefore more useful, to federal agencies, Romero said.

Michael Brostek, a workforce specialist at the General Accounting Office, said agencies have broad authority to create incentive programs, allowing them to "appeal to employees' varying motivations and provide the flexibility to reward individuals, teams and other subgroups of employees."

While that may be true, Gross pointed out that the $75,000 in funds she was budgeted for monetary incentives this year doesn't allow her to reward very many employees.

National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley said the solution to recruitment and retention woes is easy. If Congress would just implement the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA), it would "do more to address recruitment and retention in the federal government then all remaining incentive programs combined," she said.

Under FEPCA, federal employees were to receive an annual nationwide pay raise in addition to a locality-based pay adjustment in order to close the gap between federal and private sector salaries. But the law has never been fully implemented because of the costs of funding the increases that would be required to close the pay gap.

FEPCA also included provisions allowing recruitment bonuses and retention allowances. Unfortunately, "agencies simply do not have the resources to adequately fund these important incentives," Kelley said.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said he got the message loud and clear. "Congress has been remiss in appropriating funds," he said.