President signs end to NSPS
October 28th, 2009 | Agencies Congress Defense Pay & Benefits | Posted by Rebecca Neal
President Barack Obama signed the Defense authorization bill into law Wednesday afternoon, marking the eventual end to the controversial National Security Personnel System.
HR 2647 phases out the NSPS pay-for-performance system by Jan 1, 2012, and the Pentagon has six months from Wednesday to start transferring employees over to their original pay system. For many employees, that means a return to the General Schedule.
The bill also contains a number of provisions long anticipated by federal employees:
- Federal Employment Retirement System (FERS) employees will be able to count unused sick leave toward their years of service, just as Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) employees can. This may end the epidemic of “FERS flu,” where soon-to-retire employees burn off sick leave because they couldn’t receive credit for it.
- FERS employees returning to work for the federal government would be able to redeposit their annuities.
- CSRS employees who work part time at the end of their careers would be able to have their annuities recalculated to be based only on their full-time salaries.
- Retirees returning to work for the federal government would be able to collect their full salaries while drawing their annuities. Agencies used to be able to pay rehired annuitants a full salary only if they obtained a waiver from the Office of Personnel Management.
- Federal employees in Alaska, Hawaii and U.S. territories will now receive locality pay instead of cost of living. Employees in the continental U.S. receive locality pay.
Feel free to celebrate in the comments section below, feds!
Breaking: April Stephenson out as DCAA Director
October 26th, 2009 | Defense Procurement | Posted by Elise Castelli
UPDATE: Full story now on FederalTimes.com. Click here.
Embattled Defense Contract Audit Agency director April Stephenson was removed from her post earlier today, the Defense Department has announced.
Stephenson, who was spent her entire career at DCAA, was reassigned to the staff of DoD Comptroller Robert Hale. Hale, who oversees DCAA, replaced her with Army Auditor General Patrick Fitzgerald, said Navy Cmdr. Darryn James, a Pentagon spokesman. Fitzgerald takes over Nov. 9.
The move was announced during an internal teleconference at 2 p.m. today. Following the teleconference DCAA staff was notified via email, James said.
Fitzgerald was chosen to take over the reformation of DCAA because he has “a fresh perspective and new ideas,” James said.
Stephenson’s leadership of DCAA has been dominated by the fallout from two Government Accountability Office reports that found auditors there cut corners, changed audit findings to be favorable to contractors without good cause, and rushed audits to completion to meet cost and management pressures.
At a hearing earlier this year, lawmakers on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee expressed concern over whether someone with a long history inside DCAA could effectively reform it.
More to come soon on FederalTimes.com.
Tags: April Stephenson, DCAA, Patrick Fitzgerald, Robert Hale
FYI: DoD contractor headcounts now available…sort of
October 13th, 2009 | Defense Procurement | Posted by Elise Castelli
Two Defense Department agencies announced the release of their fiscal year 2008 contractor inventories in today’s Federal Register.
The inventory for the Missle Defense Agency, which posted its headcount here, doesn’t appear to include much information about the number of contractors performing the work. In fact, that column appears to be blank for most of the contracts listed in the 210 page document.
The Defense Contract Management Agency also posted a notice about its list, but at the time this is being posted, the list isn’t on the agency’s site. The notice says it has 30 days to post its contractor inventory.
In the 2008 Defense authorization bill, Congress required Defense agencies to take a headcount of the contractor employees performing services work in their offices. The goal is to grasp how many contractors are actually employed by DoD to improve management of the contracts and assist the department’s efforts to convert some of that work to federal employee positions.
House passes Defense authorization bill
October 8th, 2009 | Defense | Posted by Steve Losey
The House just approved the 2010 Defense authorization bill, which would (among other things) kill the National Security Personnel System. The Senate won’t vote on the bill until Friday at the earliest, and could wait until next week to consider it.
You can read more about the bill here, here and here.
Tags: Defense Authorization, NSPS
NSPS update 2: Intel system suspended as well
October 7th, 2009 | Defense | Posted by Steve Losey
It looks like the Defense Authorization Bill is going to throw a monkey wrench in the intelligence community’s pay for performance system as well. The bill (all 1,492 pages of which can be read here — skip to page 780 for the NSPS provisions) would suspend the Defense Civilian Intelligence Personnel System for everybody except employees at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, who have had that system for the last decade, until the end of 2010. And since the IC’s system is based in part on that system, that’s going to slow Chief Human Capital Officer Ron Sanders’ efforts to pay spies, analysts and other intelligence employees based on how well they perform. The bill says the Pentagon, OPM and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence should study the system.
Other things I noticed:
- The bill guarantees nobody will have their pay reduced in the move back to the General Schedule or their original system. (pg 782)
- It calls for Defense Secretary Robert Gates to set up “a fair, credible, and transparent performance appraisal system for employees” that is linked to bonuses and other performance-based actions. The system should ensure ongoing feedback and dialogue between supervisors, managers and employees, and set timetables for review, the bill says. And it calls for expanding training, counseling and mentoring opportunities for employees. (pg 784)
- It’s possible that whatever performance appraisal system DoD ends up with might not be that different from performance appraisal under NSPS. The NSPS review panel that in August harshly criticized it as systemically flawed and recommended it be “reconstructed” also praised its performance appraisal system. So the Pentagon could stick with that and build a new system around it.
- Gates has six months after the bill is passed to start shifting employees out of NSPS. (pg 781)
- He also has six months to propose a new personnel system that fixes the problems with NSPS, and explain why he doesn’t want to shift employees back to the General Schedule. Congress would have to approve the new proposal as part of the fiscal 2011 Defense Authorization bill. (pg 792-795)
- I just got of the phone with Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., who counts many DoD employees as his constituents. He said that one of the biggest problems with NSPS was the political baggage that came with it — unions felt former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shunned them when NSPS was being crafted and were outraged that the Pentagon attempted to limit collective bargaining rights as part of NSPS.
- Moran said “I wouldn’t be at all surprised” when I asked if he thinks the Pentagon might try to propose a new personnel system to replace NSPS. Moran noted that President Barack Obama supports the concept of pay for performance, and thinks that some aspects of NSPS will return. But he said as Obama crafts a new pay-for-performance system — whether at DoD or governmentwide — he will likely engage unions and employees more than the Bush administration did, which will give him a better chance of succeeding.
NSPS repeal update: Return to GS by 2012
October 7th, 2009 | Defense | Posted by Steve Losey
Here’s a few new details on the Defense Authorization Bill’s repeal of the National Security Personnel System that lawmakers on a House-Senate conference committee have agreed upon:
- All 205,000 employees currently under NSPS will be transferred back to their original pay system by Jan. 1, 2012, according to a statement from Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y. The bulk of NSPS employees were originally under the General Schedule system.
- American Federation of Government Employees President John Gage — who in June compared NSPS to Dracula — thinks the Defense Authorization Bill will be the final stake in the heart of the program.
- But it’s not a done deal yet. Army Times reporter Rick Maze tells me that other issues could scuttle the authorization bill. Rick said that one provision in the bill, which would authorize more spending for Joint Strike Fighter engines, could get the whole thing vetoed. Also, Republican opposition to a Hate Crimes Prevention Act rider could trip the bill up in the Senate.
- And Gage told me that the bill provides one slim chance for the Defense Department to save NSPS. According to Gage, language in the authorization bill says that if the Pentagon manages to “reconstruct,” or radically overhaul, NSPS to Congress’ satisfaction within a certain time period, and if Congress passes a bill saying it’s satisified with the NSPS reconstruction, the system could be saved. But, of course, that’s an awful lot of “ifs,” and at this point, it’s not looking good for NSPS.
- Gage said that new department-wide flexibilities on hiring, assigning personnel and appraising employee performance will be subject to collective bargaining.
Keep watching www.federaltimes.com for more information.
Tags: Congress, Defense Authorization, John Gage, NSPS
More concerns about DCAA audit opinions
September 22nd, 2009 | Agency Management Congress Defense Procurement | Posted by Elise Castelli
Earlier today I previewed reports the Government Accountability Office and the Defense Department Inspector General will release tomorrow highlighting the depth of auditing problems at the Defense Contract Audit Agency.
But these watchdogs are not the only ones with concerns about DCAA’s audit management. The Wartime Contracting Commission — a bipartisan, congressionally chartered panel tasked with making recommendations to improve contingency contracting — released this report today calling on DCAA to abandon the all-or-nothing approach it takes when rendering opinions on contractor business systems.
In December, DCAA scrapped its opinion that allowed business systems with minor deficiencies to be deemed “inadequate in part.” A prior GAO report that found the auditors in DCAA’s western region were pressured by supervisors to change the middle-ground opinions to “adequate” in order to please contractors. Contractors can only directly bill the government for work if their systems are deemed fully “adequate,” or reliable. If a contractor can directly bill the government, it doesn’t have to go through a lengthy invoice approval process.
But the commission, which has held a series of hearings about the adequacy of contractors’ cost estimating and accounting systems, found the new pass-fail policy increases the government’s risk of wasting money because it diminishes the importance of an inadequate audit finding.
Under the new rules, a system is deemed “inadequate,” or unreliable, if even one minor aspect of the accounting system is broken. Such a blanket finding is “not informative enough to help contracting officers make effective decisions” about how to hold the contractor accountable for fixing problems, according to the commission report.
The report went on to say:
Rather than giving system deficiencies more importance, it seems to have the opposite effect — undermining the significance of the audit findings and weakening their effectiveness…Without any reasonable provision for more accurately describing systems that are less than perfect, contractors and contracting officers find the ‘adequate/inadequate’ options too restrictive.”
A graduated grading system is needed to give contracting officers clear information about the monetary losses that could result from a system deficiency and the level of risk that deficiency poses, so contracting officers can decide how to hold contractors accountable, the report said.
Tags: DCAA, DCMA, DoD IG, GAO, Wartime Contracting Commission
The incredible shrinking government
September 21st, 2009 | Defense Facilities General Services Administration | Posted by Tim Kauffman
The federal government may be growing under President Barack Obama, but a just-released report shows the government is actually getting smaller.
Confused?
It turns out that while federal agencies are hiring more workers, they’re also getting rid of thousands of buildings they no longer need. The number of buildings in the federal inventory declined nearly 9 percent in 2008, or roughly 70 million square feet, according to a report posted today by the General Services Administration.
GSA attributes the decrease to a reduction of 36,000 military housing units and 4,000 warehouses by the Air Force and Navy.
Tags: buildings, real property
Senate committee to examine DCAA reform
September 16th, 2009 | Agencies Congress Defense | Posted by Rebecca Neal
Reforming the Defense Contract Audit Agency will be the topic at a Sept. 23 Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.
The hearing will examine who is responsible for reforming the DCAA, which lawmakers have discussed relocating to ensure independence from the Defense Department’s comptroller. In a recent report, the Government Accountability Office found that DCAA managers pressured field auditors to change audit results to favor contractors and ignored basic auditing standards to expedite work and meet rigid performance standards.
The hearing will be 10 a.m. in Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., and the Federal Times will be there.
Fed Times on the air: Interview with News Channel 8
August 27th, 2009 | Defense | Posted by Steve Losey
I paid a visit to the Washington-area cable program Federal News Tonight last evening to talk about the future of the National Security Personnel System. Take a look:
I usually appear once a month on Federal News Tonight to discuss the latest in federal personnel matters, and from here on in, we’ll be posting my interviews the following morning. Keep checking back for more.
Tags: Federal News Tonight, NSPS, Stephen Losey