For the better part of a decade, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service paid for the apartment, meals and “incidentals” of one of its highest-ranking employees — compensating him for the equivalent of a hotel rate every day merely for being in the city where he lived and worked full time — on top of his $174,000 annual salary.
With only 230 employees and a $50 million annual budget, the FMCS was established in 1947 but only rarely appears in the public eye, usually while mediating labor-management conflicts for professional sports groups, including the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball, government agencies like the FAA and non-profits such as the Red Cross.
From 2005 to 2009, while Scot Beckenbaugh served in the top two jobs at agency headquarters in Washington, his official “duty station” remained in Iowa, which an agency spokesman justified by saying that Beckenbaugh held “temporary” positions for years.
After he could no longer be deemed “temporary,” the agency agreed to pay Beckenbaugh’s rent in the District of Columbia while technically recording his residence as Iowa, reasoning that the rural state is “centrally located.”
“Because of his extensive travel schedule, there was no financial benefit seen for the agency in changing Mr. Beckenbaugh’s duty station from Des Moines, which is centrally located, to Washington,” agency spokesman John Arnold told the Washington Examiner.
That meant FMCS paid for a furnished apartment for Beckenbaugh in D.C., which they justified by saying it was cheaper than paying for a hotel room. And they paid for all of his meals, as if he were taking a business trip that lasted five straight years.
“FMCS paid travel reimbursement for transportation, hotels (or apartment if less than hotel) and meals and incidentals when Mr. Beckenbaugh was in official travel status outside of his duty station in Iowa. Because federal records retention requirements mandate that such records are to be destroyed after three years, complete financial records for this period do not exist,” Arnold said.
Beckenbaugh lives in an apartment on D.C.’s swanky Dupont Circle, where one-bedrooms go for $4,000 a month.
“In November, 2009, Washington, D.C. was designated as Mr. Beckenbaugh’s new duty station by the newly appointed agency director. This change meant that Mr. Beckenbaugh only received travel reimbursement and/or per diem for official travel outside the Washington, D.C. metro area, and the agency no longer incurred the cost of the rental apartment,” Arnold said.
Despite the “centrally located” claim, expense records show that in the majority of cases, it cost more to fly from Iowa to various business meetings than it to did from D.C. — far from somehow saving so much money that it made it worth it to pay for his D.C. apartment.
If his business travel outside the D.C. region in recent years is indicative, Beckenbaugh has expensive tastes, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in hotel, travel and food reimbursements for what would seem like quick, cheap trips to mid-sized East Coast cities.
Beckenbaugh filed for $60,000 in reimbursements from FMCS last year for travel costs he paid out of pocket. That total did not include substantial other costs that were billed directly to the agency, including a trip to China that cost more than $17,000.
In July 2013, Beckenbaugh even billed FMCS $1,000 for a five-night stay in a D.C. hotel, to which he acknowledged in his expense report that he walked from his District apartment.
At FMCS, an employee’s official place of work and where he actually labors can have little connection.
The presence of an official like the agency’s chief financial officer would seem to be obvious, but Fran Leonard has a teleworking agreement with the agency that allows her to work from home three days a week and to begin work at 6 a.m. and end by 2p.m., five days a week. Leonard is a member of the Senior Executive Service, the federal civil service’s highest career management rank.
She lives in rural Virginia, outside the normal commuting ring. She is paid $171,000 annually.
“She works in accord with the federal law, the president’s policy, and her agency telework agreement,” Arnold said.
Lu-Ann Glaser, the agency’s director of alternative dispute resolution services, which is the heart of FMCS’ mission, is allowed to live in Pennsylvania, with FMCS paying for a hotel for her in D.C. for one or two weeks out of every month.
FMCS claims that the cost-of-living adjustment between her salary in Pennsylvania and what it would be in D.C. is so great that it outweighs that cost.
A former employee claimed in sworn testimony included in a Department of Justice referral that acting FMCS Director Allison Beck steered the job to a friend and revised the position description to exclude a reference of it being in D.C.-based.
Glaser, a former mail carrier and president of her local postal workers’ union, was hired as FMCS’s director of alternative dispute resolution services, instead of other qualified applicants, such as lawyers, who would have worked the same job in D.C.
“It doesn’t make any financial or business sense to accommodate her in that way, you know, to let her live there, because we have to pay her travel. She comes in for a week, and we have to put her up in a hotel,” an inspector general was told by an employee in the sworn testimony.
The Examiner also reported last year that FMCS’ information technology chief — whose job involves configuring hardware — lives in West Virginia, routinely has expensive equipment shipped to his house and rarely visits the agency’s D.C. headquarters.
