Managers who get comp time may not benefit from overtime change

New overtime pay cap rules for high-grade federal employees may actually penalize workers who receive compensation time for their extra hours.

Congress raised the overtime pay cap last year, in the 2004 Defense Authorization Act, allowing employees to be paid at the rate of time and a half for a GS-10, Step 1, or at the employee's basic rate of pay, whichever is greater.

Previously, the cap was limited to time and a half for a GS-10, Step 1, which meant that any employee ranked at or above GS-12, Step 6 actually earned a lower pay rate working overtime than working regular hours. For example, a GS-13, Step 9, supervisor earned $37.18 per hour last year, but for overtime, that same supervisor earned the overtime wage of a GS-10, Step 1, or $28.11 per hour.

But some government employees are discovering that the new rules might not benefit those federal workers who receive comp time when they work overtime hours. Part of the reason is that General Schedule employees' total biweekly earnings, including overtime, still cannot exceed the biweekly earnings of a GS-15, Step 10.

David Harper, a chief engineer at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M., supervises several high-grade employees who accrue large amounts of overtime working on aircraft accident investigations. At first blush, he points out, "The new overtime pay cap would seem to be a benefit. But in reality, it usually has a negative impact" for workers who put in very long hours and receive comp time for their efforts.

Many agencies require employees to take overtime as comp time, rather than a monetary payment.

Consider the case of a GS-14, Step 6 who works back-to-back 60-hour weeks and receives comp time for his efforts. Last year, the basic rate of pay for a GS-14, Step 6 was $40.46 per hour. And under last year's rules, the employee's overtime rate would have been equivalent to time and a half for a GS-10, Step 1, or $28.11.

If the GS-14, Step 6 employee were paid for the overtime, he would have hit the biweekly GS-15, Step 10 cap: $4,242.40. But since he receives comp time rather than money for his overtime, the employee would have received 35.77 vacation hours-the difference between the biweekly pay cap and his biweekly wage ($3,236.80), divided by his overtime rate of $28.11 per hour.

But under the revised system, the overtime rate goes up for the employee to the new regular hourly rate for a GS-14, Step 6: $41.55. As a result, if the employee pulled back-to-back 60 hour weeks this year, he will be rewarded with only 24.88 hours of comp time.

The result, says Harper, is that some employees "will now have fewer comp time hours to take off after their periods of intense work."

Michael Orenstein, a spokesman for the Office of Personnel Management, said Harper's scenario is correct. But he added that the law and OPM regulations allow the head of an agency to apply an annual pay cap equivalent to the wage of a GS-15, Step 10, instead of the biweekly cap, in cases of emergency. An emergency is defined as "a temporary condition posing a direct threat to human life or property, including a forest wildfire emergency."

If an agency head were to declare an emergency situation, therefore, the employee would have to work overtime regularly over the course of the year to be adversely affected.