Bonuses in the cards

Don't be surprised next year if your boss says he's going to give you a cash bonus, and then hands you what appears to be an ATM bank card. The Treasury Department is ordering agencies to get rid of the petty cash funds, known in government as imprest funds, from which agency managers often draw on-the-spot cash awards. By Oct. 1, most offices will have eliminated their imprest funds. In addition to cash awards, the funds are used to reimburse employees, make small purchases and, at certain agencies, pay informants. The paper trail that follows such funds can be time-consuming, and the government doesn't earn interest on money that sits in the funds. So now Treasury is encouraging agencies to hand out U.S. debit cards in place of cold cash awards. The magnetic strip cards are similar to phone cards and college students' meal cards-they are coded to store a set amount of money that can be used at ATM machines or to make direct purchases. When the money runs out, the cards become useless. The U.S. Mint began using bonus cards in January, while the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has been handing out the cards as on-the-spot awards for two years. The value of the cards ranges from $40 to $500. The cards usually take five to eight days to arrive once a manager requests them. Employees get personal identification numbers that they use to access the money on the cards. In 1998, federal agencies handed out 658,530 cash awards averaging $429 each. For more information on the cards, see the Office of Personnel Management's Spring 2001 "Workforce Performance" newsletter. Full Overtime Pay In addition to providing money for a 4.6 percent average pay raise for Transportation Department workers next year, the House-passed 2002 Transportation Appropriations bill provides money to fund full overtime pay for National Transportation Safety Board accident investigators. The House passed the bill Tuesday, setting aside about $700,000 next year for NTSB investigators' overtime. (For more on the overall pay raise, see "Bush administration fights House move to provide 4.6 percent pay raise.") Last year, Congress authorized an overtime pay rate of one and one-half times the basic rate of pay for the investigators. Until then, the investigators were limited to one and one-half times the hourly rate paid to GS-10, Step 1 employees-the same limit on all federal managers and professionals who are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act. The investigators are typically GS-15s, 14s, and 13s. Last year, Congress also authorized full time and a half for wildland fire fighters who were affected by the GS-10, Step 1, cap. Other federal managers and professionals continue to work under overtime rates at the cap, though some agencies have discovered in recent years that they incorrectly classified some employees as exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act and thus limited by the overtime cap. In 1998, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation had to pay a group of employees $3 million in back overtime pay because the agency had misclassified them as exempt from FLSA. Computer specialists at the Veterans Health Administration recently won nearly $1 million in back wages in a FLSA dispute. And the Army is reviewing the classification of thousands of employees who may be due full overtime pay under the law. Nurses' Leave Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., introduced a bill last week that would allow registered nurses who work for the federal government to count unused sick leave toward their retirement calculations. The extra credit, which would be given to nurses under the Federal Employees Retirement System, could boost nurses' pensions. The bill is S. 1080.