Former TSA Executive’s Excessive Bonuses Prompt Inquiry Into SES Awards

A Senate Democrat wants answers on bonuses awarded to federal senior executives during the past few fiscal years, after it was revealed that a former Transportation Security Administration official received $90,000 in performance awards in just 13 months.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., is asking the Office of Personnel Management for data on the number of senior executives who received multiple bonuses in any fiscal year between fiscal years 2011 and 2015, as well as how many of those performance awards exceeded the statutory caps on what agencies are allowed to pay out.

Kelly Hoggan, the former assistant administrator for TSA’s Office of Security Operations, received approximately $90,000 in performance awards, paid in $10,000 increments, over a 13-month period beginning in 2013. TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger in late May announced Hoggan’s removal, and has capped TSA’s performance awards for individual employees at $10,000 annually.

Under law, SES performance awards are provided in a lump sum and must be between 5 percent and 20 percent of the individual’s rate of basic pay at the end of the appraisal period; total governmentwide awards in any fiscal year are limited to 10 percent of the aggregate amount of basic pay senior executives in the previous fiscal year. For fiscal 2014, the Obama administration limited the total amount of performance awards to 5 percent of the aggregate SES salaries. In December 2015, Obama issued an executive order raising the aggregate spending cap on executive performance awards to 7.5 percent.

“Hoggan’s $90,000 in bonus payments in 13 months is a clear violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the law,” McCaskill wrote in a June 14 letter to OPM acting Director Beth Cobert. “For these payments to be 20 percent of his base salary, he would have had to have earned more than $450,000.” Hoggan, who became assistant administrator at TSA in 2013, earned a salary of about $181,000 at the time.

McCaskill also pointed out that Hoggan’s bonuses came at a time when the agency’s inspector general conducted an undercover investigation of the airport screening process and was able to carry illegal weapons and fake explosives through security checkpoints 67 out of 70 times. More recently, staffing challenges and high turnover at TSA have contributed to long screening lines at airports across the country, causing people to miss their flights.

“Federal employees should not be compensated in a manner that is deliberately intended to evade scrutiny and allow employees and agencies to exceed the 20 percent cap,” McCaskill wrote.

The percentage of career senior executives receiving a bonus based on their job performance increased by 12.2 percentage points between fiscal years 2013 and 2014, to 68.1 percent, according to OPM statistics. On average, the amount of individual performance awards also rose $347 -- from $10,213 in fiscal 2013 to $10,560 in fiscal 2014. The average performance award in fiscal 2014 for those career senior executives rated at the highest level was $11,765 – an increase of $628 for the same group in fiscal 2013.

McCaskill has shown an interest before in senior executives’ bonuses. In March 2015, she introduced the Stop Wasteful Federal Bonuses Act, along with Republicans Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Deb Fischer of Nebraska. The bill, which still is pending in the Senate, would prohibit agency heads from awarding bonuses to employees who could be fired or suspended for violating agency policy, or for doing something illegal that could land them in prison for more than a year. The bonus ban for those employees would last for five years.