PEER called putting employees on indefinite leave “an abusive management practice” and said “we often see whistleblowers or employees who deliver inconvenient truths placed into limbo in hopes that they will simply resign.” Image: Camilo Concha/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffA public interest group has filed a suit seeking to compel OPM to finalize rules to carry out changes in law enacted in 2016 that among other things would limit the practice of putting federal employees on administrative leave indefinitely pending a possible disciplinary action.
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility said that while the law called for implementing rules to be finalized by September 2017, OPM never finalized rules it proposed in July of that year “and still has no firm date for doing so.”
It said the delay “costs taxpayers millions of dollars annually to pay thousands of employees who are under orders to stay home and are forbidden from working” and that “employees placed on leave have no ability to appeal or even learn the reason for the involuntary suspension, which is not even classified as an adverse personnel action.”
The change in law resulted from a 2014 GAO report finding that in 2011-2013, more than 57,000 employees were put on administrative leave for more than a month—about 4,000 for more than three months and above 200 for more than a year. In most cases, it said, those were employees who had been notified of intended disciplinary action against them and were awaiting a final agency decision.
The law formally established administrative leave in law and defined its allowable uses; it traditionally had been used as a catchall form of excused absence for a variety of purposes. It further created separate categories for some of those purposes: weather and safety leave for situations in which it is unsafe to work at an agency site or travel to it; investigative leave to be used for no more than 10 days for disciplinary investigations; and notice leave for no more than the period between a disciplinary notice and its effective date.
Only the portion of the proposed rules involving weather and safety leave have been finalized, however; that form of leave was used by some agencies during the pandemic, especially during the early period while agencies were still gearing up their telework capacity.
PEER called putting employees on indefinite leave “an abusive management practice” and said “we often see whistleblowers or employees who deliver inconvenient truths placed into limbo in hopes that they will simply resign.”
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