A polite tiff has broken out between the U.S. Postal Service and its inspector general over whether a pension should count in determining whether a top officer’s compensation exceeded a legal pay cap. The officer, who was not named in the report, but whom sources identified as Paul Vogel, president of digital solutions, made a total last year of $306,250 in annual salary, pension and bonus, IG auditors found in a newly released report. That would be well above the maximum pay limit of $276,840 for USPS executives holding specially designated “critical” positions, according to the audit, which said the Postal…
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The U.S. Postal Service has lost round one of a court fight over information sought by a California watchdog agency in connection with a case of alleged electoral dirty tricks. In a ruling this month, Senior U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell said the mail carrier must tell the California Fair Political Practices Commission how many pieces of mail a former Los Angeles-area school board member sent out under his bulk mailing permit in late October 2008 as he faced a recall election. The Postal Service failed to show that the information was exempt from disclosure under the federal Freedom of…
The non-profit firm that runs the nation’s largest Combined Federal Campaign has recovered about one-third of the $308,000 it had to repay earlier this year after auditors questioned spending for such items as meals for loaned executives, flowers and a night out at a Washington Nationals baseball game. Global Impact, which manages the National Capital Area CFC, had sought reimbursement for about $294,000 of that total; Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry agreed to return $$102,100 after reviewing additional documentation, according to an Aug. 14 letter released today at Federal Times’ request. Among the expenses that Berry decided were…
Federal agencies expect to save $2.5 billion over the next three years by consolidating duplicative information technology systems, buying in bulk and eliminating failing IT projects. Those savings were identified using a new approach – called PortfolioStat – where agency officials review their spending for common IT resources such as email and desktop computers in search of duplicative investments and opportunities to consolidate projects, Acting Office of Management and Budget Director Jeffrey Zients said in a blog post Wednesday. OMB officials met with agencies’ senior executives, including the chief information officer, financial officer, acquisition officer and operating officer this summer. OMB used data collected for these meetings to show agencies where their…
Despite maxing out a $15 billion line of credit with the U.S. Treasury last month, the U.S. Postal Service can scrape by at least through March. That’s according to Ruth Goldway, chair of the Postal Regulatory Commission, the agency that oversees the Postal Service. The commission meets with USPS officials following the release of each quarterly financial report, the last of which was in August. In the ensuing review, the Postal Service “projected that they would be able to continue operating without disruption until at least midway through the fiscal year without any action by Congress,” Goldway said in a statement to…
Three men were handed down prison sentences this week for participating in a scheme to defraud the government of more than $20 million through Army Corps of Engineers contracts, the Justice Department announced Thursday. Harold Babb, the former director of contracts at Eyak Technology LLC, was sentenced to seven years and three months in prison on federal charges of bribery and unlawful kickbacks, according to a news release. Babb admitted that he paid Army Corps of Engineers program manager Kerry Khan in return for Khan’s approval on contracts and subcontracts to EyakTek and Big Surf Construction Management, an EyakTek subcontractor,…
More than half of the conference spending reported by the Commerce Department in the first quarter of fiscal 2012 was based on estimated and unsupported costs, according to a new inspector general report. The IG found that 65 percent or $1.1 million of the total $1.7 million in conference spending reported by Commerce was not based on actual costs for things such as meals and incidental expenses, transportation and lodging costs. This also included budgeted expenses that the department could not provide sufficient documentation for. Some bureaus said they used estimates because the actual expenses were not available at the…
It’s been a couple of months since a hullabaloo over allegedly illegal money moves at the National Weather Service briefly left several thousand employees at risk of unpaid furloughs. But various inquiries into the affair are still under way, and a recently obtained copy of the original investigative report offers some intriguing details not previously disclosed. For many years, for example, senior leaders at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have viewed the weather service’s business operations model as “unsustainable” because a high level of labor costs eats into management flexibility, according to a heavily redacted copy of the 61-page…
Tight money has again led the Social Security Administration to halt the mailing of all paper statements of earnings and benefits to millions of Americans. These are the handy documents that give you an idea of what to expect in terms of Social Security retirement or disability income. The latest suspension, which took effect Oct. 1, results from the “overall budget situation,” including a stop-gap continuing resolution that will leave the agency at last year’s funding levels through March, spokeswoman Kia Anderson said. SSA officials had originally suspended mailing paper statements in April 2011 to save $70 million annually. This…
Security measures intended to prevent the placement of roadside bombs on a major highway in Afghanistan were improperly installed, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in a safety alert last week. The “culvert denial systems” were designed to prevent insurgents from placing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in roadway culverts, according to the alert, which was sent to the commanders of the U.S. Central Command and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan. “Through our preliminary investigative work, we estimate that a large number of culvert denial systems might have been falsely reported by Afghan contractors as complete when, in fact, the denial systems…