MSPB has reported that through March, no employee who brought an appeal of a furlough due to last year’s sequester has won, while adding that the workload of such cases continues to be a substantial burden on its operations and will be so for at least through next year.
In the wake of the sequester furloughs last spring and summer, MSPB received more than 32,000 appeals, which is about five times its total normal annual workload. The merit board’s annual report says that just docketing and organizing those cases consumed a huge amount of the agency’s attention in the fall but that it has started working through them with the goal of having all of them decided by the end of fiscal 2015.
“This volume of initial appeals had and continues to have an extraordinary impact on MSPB’s regional and field offices,” it says.
About two-thirds of the cases have been consolidated into 724 cases that share common features such as the duty location and deciding official. Of the remainder, about 2,000 have been processed at regional offices, with about 40 percent of those being dismissed for various reasons, such as being filed too late or being abandoned.
Of the cases that were adjudicated on the merits by regional hearing officers, all were decided in favor of the agency. As of the end of March, four appeals were pending at the merit board level.
The report noted that last fall, MSPB issued a precedential decision that gives substantial deference to agency furlough decisions, essentially requiring that employees prove they were treated differently than others who were similarly situated.
