Fedweek Legal

A former Army employee filed a disability discrimination case against his employer. The EEOC found discrimination and ordered back pay and other benefits. As part of the remedy, the EEOC ordered the Army to correct its records to reflect that the complainant’s appointment had been extended for one year and to issue him retroactive benefits and backpay. After the denial of several requests for reconsideration, the complainant filed a petition for enforcement arguing that he was entitled to a promotion to a term position and claiming improper calculation of backpay. The EEOC denied his promotion claim, but ordered the Army to correct the backpay errors. The Army attempted to correct the backpay, but the complainant was still dissatisfied. As a result, he filed a lawsuit in U.S. district court.

The plaintiff claimed that the EEOC’s decision as to liability was correct, but sought only review of the remedy. That is, the plaintiff did not seek the federal court’s review of whether discrimination had occurred; but rather, he sought review of the EEOC’s remedy. In its decision, Timmons v. White, 2003 U.S. App. LEXIS 207 (10th Cir. 2003), the Tenth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that it must consider the case as a whole and that it could not consider only the remedy. While the federal circuit courts have split in their interpretation of this issue, the Tenth Circuit held that de novo review “requires a trial of all the issues in the particular case,” citing 29 C.F.R.