The U.S. Secret Service is refusing to release an internal agency chart providing guidelines for disciplinary actions for particular types of misconduct.
“At this point we are not releasing” the guideline, known as a table of penalties, a Secret Service spokesman said Thursday in response to a Washington Examiner request for a copy.
After the May 2012 prostitution scandal involving more than a dozens agents, then-Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan established a Professionalism Reinforcement Working Group, consisting of representatives from the Pentagon, FBI and Secret Service.
The group was tasked with reviewing the Secret Service’s internal controls on professional conduct and benchmarking the best practices of other “peer organizations,” as well as identifying areas where the agency is performing well and others that require improvement.
The peer organizations were the FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, and the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
One of the group’s 17 recommendations to the Secret Service was to establish a table of penalties in response to findings that the agency often punishes employees less severely than the range of recommended disciplinary actions at other Department of Homeland Security law enforcement components.
A table of penalties provides some assurance to employees that those charged with evaluating misconduct will do so in a systematic, uniform way.
“Every federal agency has a table of penalties so that managers, making decisions about disciplinary actions on federal employees charged with misconduct, can review what the appropriate level of recommended discipline is,” said Cheri Cannon, a partner at Tully Rinckey who specializes in federal labor and employment law.
“By use of the table, agencies are trying to ensure consistency among different management officials penalties when making decisions about the consequences of different employees’ misconduct,” she added.
The Washington Examiner asked the Secret Service for its table of penalties after analyzing a chart of every misconduct case over the last five years and the disciplinary action taken. Acting Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy last week sent Congress a copy of the chart, which included 394 total cases of misconduct by 356 agents or officers.
The chart showed that the agency has a history of imposing far lower penalties than the FBI for drunken driving and other alcohol related incidents. The FBI requires at least a 30-day suspension without pay for an off-duty drunken driving charge. In 2009, the Transportation Security Administration also began imposing a 30-day suspension without pay for federal air marshals arrested on drunken driving charges.
A December 2013 Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of misconduct found “no evidence” that agency employees frequently engage in behavior contrary to conduct standards and which could cause a security concern.
It did, however, say that the agency should continue to monitor and address excessive alcohol consumption and personal conduct within its workforce.
Charles Edwards, the DHS inspector general who led that review, was put on administrative leave earlier this year after a Senate investigation found that he was too cozy with top DHS officials and altered and delayed reports at their request.
