A federal appeals court has ruled that an agency did not coerce the resignation of an employee by giving him a short period of time to consider his options in a disciplinary case, and thus the resignation was not involuntary and therefore not appealable to MSPB.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in case No. 07-3119 recounted that at a meeting with the employee, agency officials gave him three choices: receive a notice of proposed removal and later resign in lieu of termination; respond to the removal notice before an agency official who would be the deciding official; or resign that day for "personal reasons." The agency gave the employee one hour to make a decision; he chose the latter option but later filed an appeal at MSPB arguing that the resignation was involuntary.
The court wrote that an employee may establish that a resignation is involuntary by demonstrating that the resignation was the product of coercion–showing that the agency essentially imposed the terms of the resignation on the employee, that the employee had no alternative to resignation, and that the resignation was a result of improper acts by the agency. The court noted that it has held that a relatively short period of time between the employer’s alleged coercive act and the employee’s retirement is evidence of involuntariness.
In the present case, though, the agency was obligated to offer only the former two choices, and that the offer to accept a resignation for "personal reasons" carried benefits to the employee such as avoiding a negative employment reference that might have resulted if a formal removal occurred, the decision said.
Under the circumstances, the fact that the employee "had a relatively short period of time to decide whether to sign the settlement agreement and resign in lieu of receiving the notice of proposed removal did not render his resignation involuntary," the court said.
