IG’s office at the Export-Import Bank has said some employees potentially have received improperly high locality pay. Image: Pamela Au/Shutterstock.com
In a report that likely will be used as fuel by opponents of offsite by federal employees, the IG’s office at the Export-Import Bank has said some employees potentially have received improperly high locality pay.
An audit found 13 employees working under either remote work arrangements or routine telework arrangements who received pay at the Washington, D.C. area rate even though their personal residences are listed as in locations ranging from New Hampshire to Florida and from North Carolina to Texas, the IG said.
The IG said that at least nine of them appear to have been paid by nearly $100,000 in total annually—above $20,000 a year for two of the employees—but said it was “unable to confirm the total amount of any improper locality payments due to data limitations associated with the agency’s timekeeping and access control systems.”
Those limitations included inconsistency in how employees record their hours in the timekeeping system, leaving auditors unable to verify whether the teleworkers reported to EXIM’s headquarters twice per pay period as required (remote workers are not expected to report regularly to an agency site). Further, EXIM headquarters “does not have adequate building controls to track when employees enter or exit the building.” Other issues raised in the audit included that the agency “lacked a clear policy on remote work and that telework agreements were not regularly updated.”
The report recommended that EXIM “conduct a comprehensive review of its telework policy and complete a review of its staff work agreements, home of record, and locality pay to ensure compliance with the policy.” Because the report was a management alert, there was no response from management.
Many Republicans in Congress have included among their arguments to restrict federal telework that agencies are not ensuring that they have correctly designated the duty stations for locality pay—which is based on an employee’s duty station, not the place of residence—especially in cases where employees may have moved out of a higher-cost zone during the pandemic.
The report follows one from the Commerce Department IG last year that sampled 31 employees from various bureaus who had switched to remote work or full-time telework that effectively is remote work, to a location with a lower locality rate than that of the former location. It found that seven did not have their duty stations updated timely and had been overpaid for as long as 11 months, totaling $43,000.
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