A professional association for high-level career federal employees opposes a proposal to limit the government retirement pensions of Department of Veterans Affairs executives if they are convicted of a crime in connection with their duties.
The proposal by House Committee on Veterans Affairs Chairman Jeff Miller would reduce pensions if a top executive was convicted of a felony that “influenced the individual’s performance” at the VA. The Senior Executives Association said doing that might unfairly intrude on the personal lives of federal workers whose felony convictions were unrelated to their job performance.
“Our fear is some of these are punitive, and its going to make it tough to recruit new senior executives,” said Senior Executive Service legislative director Jennifer Mattingley. The SEA represents members of the top slice of managers in the federal workforce. Their pay range is from $120,749 to $181,500 annually.
“The first thing is to make sure this is fair. If the pension is for the time period when they committed the felony, certainly we’re committed to making sure they’re held accountable, but we want to make sure there’s due process and what they’re found guilty of has to do with their job,” she said.
SEA, which is akin to a union for the SES, has opposed three related proposals from Miller, the Florida Republican whose aggressive oversight has been instrumental in focusing national attention on longstanding abuses at VA, including employees faking appointment wait-times and the time required to process veterans’ benefit claims.
Miller’s first proposal made it easier to fire top VA executives responsible for the scandal. Miller introduced the proposal after VA leaders told his committee that it was very difficult to remove corrupt or incompetent managers. President Obama signed that into law last summer.
The second Miller proposal would allow VA to rescind bonuses awarded based on falsified data.
“The view that a secretary would need the authority to ‘claw back’ a performance award would mean that the system of granting such awards is broken. Such awards are given for strong performance and taking them after the fact is nothing more than blatant punishment — and could be utilized for reasons that are optically and politically motivated,” SEA president Carol Bonosaro wrote to Miller.
Bonosaro has previously suggested that VA employees had no choice but to concoct false records to boost their performance metrics without increasing care: “Is it possible that the lack of sufficient medical staff, along with pressure to meet appointment time goals, resulted in employees maintaining separate wait lists?”
Miller noted that the department has paid over $1 million to compensate whistleblowers who were fired after calling attention to still more waste and fraud, yet it hadn’t disciplined those who retaliated.
Even as senior political appointees at VA told Congress that bureaucratic processes were preventing them from firing people deeply involved in the scandal — in which veterans died waiting for care while workers manipulated paperwork to hide delays — senior executives in the department argued for a system of appeals.
“SEA has really thought the due process part is important, and while the at-will part, I get the rhetoric of wanting to clean house, but you want to make sure you’re not holding them accountable in some way just because there’s a perception that that should be done. Otherwise you’re not going to bring people in for these jobs,” Mattingley said.
She said the current system for disciplining federal employees has been working well.
“You’re going to have some bad apples and those people should be fired if they’re doing something that bad. The idea that people aren’t fired, I think the system works. Our concern is Congress is a political entity and the secretary is, too, and letting them take some of this action without due process politicizes the workforce versus letting the system that’s already in place work.”
In fact, even after VA was afforded increased authority to fire SES members, their bosses have scarcely availed themselves of it, raising the question of whether a reluctance to fire poor performers is more cultural than procedural.
Mattingley said that’s a good thing. “VA, the fact that they haven’t used it, they’re at least looking into it, saying ‘have you really done anything?’”
Tuesday, a deputy testifying before Miller’s committee would not say if VA Secretary Robert McDonald supported the ability to rescind bonuses, even though the committee had given him the increased power because managers said existing law handcuffed their ability to hold people responsible for major failures.
The latest proposal would also limit the number of senior executives eligible for bonuses by saying that only 10 percent would be rated as “outstanding” and 20 percent could make the next-highest rating.
It has seemed almost impossible for federal employees to not get top ratings. Glenn Haggstrom, head of construction at VA, for example, has received $20,000 a year in civil service performance bonuses on top of his $180,000 annual salary even as all of its major construction projects are wildly behind schedule and over budget.
Mattingley said that, despite the connotations of standing out from the rest, nearly all SES members are outstanding.
“We’ve always had concerns about quotas on performance awards. How do you choose 10 percent —what if 11 percent are doing really outstanding work? The other thing is at the SES level, these are some incredibly talented people to get in in the first place, I’d hope they’re all functioning at high levels.”
