The IRS has called off a furlough day planned for Aug. 30, and will make a final decision next month on whether any more unpaid time off is needed by the end of the fiscal year, acting Commissioner Danny Werfel told employees this week. “We have made substantial progress in cutting costs. . . Our progress is such that we have decided to postpone the furlough day scheduled for Aug. 30. We still have more work to do on the budget and cost-savings, so we will re-evaluate in early September and make a final determination as to whether we will need another…
Remember the 1997 movie, “Donnie Brasco,” based on the true-life tale of an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the mob? Now try to imagine the film if Donnie (played by Johnny Depp) had to give hitman Lefty Ruggiero (Al Pacino) written notice of his right to record their every encounter as the investigation proceeded. Chances are pretty good that this climactic bust (parental discretion advised) wouldn’t have happened: That, in essence, is the alarm being sounded by prosecutors over a House-passed bill that would require federal officials to advise people of their right to record phone conversations and in-person meetings under…
Federal employees were among the hundreds of victims of what prosecutors Thursday described as a large-scale identify theft ring operating in the Washington area. Ten people were charged in the scam to steal personal information, including social security numbers, from dental and insurance offices and other area businesses, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia announced in a news release Thursday. A copy of the indictment can be viewed here. Prosecutors said more than 600 potential victims have been identified, including employees at the State and Defense departments and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Once they stole…
When David Frankel’s idea didn’t win a $50,000 Federal Trade Commission competition seeking the public’s ideas on combating illegal robocalls, he wanted to find out why. So he called. He wrote. He even filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FTC. And soon enough, the records he received back convinced him that the FTC’s competition this year was basically a PR stunt. This week, the California entrepreneur went to court to make his case, which you can read about on Federal Times, but it’s also worth taking a look at the email exchanges between Frankel and federal officials…
I happened to be at the 35th annual sandcastle competition at Rehoboth Beach, Del., and saw that at least one sand sculptor had turned to current affairs for inspiration. I am sure you all can figure it out.
In addition to the standard two forms of identification, offer letter and contact information, new hires at the U.S. Department of Education are required to bring along a certificate of completion for cybersecurity training course. A recent internal investigation shows why that training is probably a pretty good idea. In a previously undisclosed probe into a 2011 “spear phishing” campaign, hackers targeted senior staff and managed to break through the department’s security protections to steal data from the department. Much about the incident, which was described in documents released through a Freedom of Information Act request by Federal Times, remains…
Only days after it was introduced, a proposed Senate overhaul of the U.S. Postal Service is taking its lumps from both organized labor and the mailing industry. “This bill is fatally flawed,” Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said in a Friday statement denouncing the legislation as a betrayal of USPS employees. The Association for Postal Commerce, which represents business mail users, has some “significant issues” with the measure, such as its idea for widening the Postal Service’s discretion in applying an inflation-adjusted cap on rate increases for standard mail and other areas where it dominates the…
Glen Johnson, the former online politics editor of the Boston Globe who now serves as senior adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry, required a special waiver so he wouldn’t run afoul of ethics rules by communicating with reporters from his old newspaper and the New York Times. The State Department granted the wavier back in February, but the decision wasn’t added to a public list of such waivers maintained by the Office of Government Ethics until last week. Under ethics rules that aimed to close the revolving door between government and special interests, President Obama has barred political appointees…
A former State Department contract employee and her husband pleaded guilty Friday to fraud and conspiracy charges in a scam to steer tens of millions of dollars in embassy construction contracts. Kathleen D. McGrade, 64, and Brian Collinsworth, 47, face up to 30 years in prison after their pleas in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. A sentencing date is set for Nov. 8. In plea documents, both admitted that McGrade, as contract specialist for the State Department, steered nearly $40 million in embassy construction work from 2008 to 2011 to her husband’s company, while keeping their marriage a secret…
The White House has kicked off its fifth annual “Save Award” competition where thousands of federal employees submit ideas on how to cut waste from the government. Last year, Department of Education employee Frederick Winter won. Winter’s idea, which came to him after he turned 65, proposed that all federal employees with transit benefits shift from regular to senior fare as soon as they’re eligible. Steve Posner, associate director for strategic planning and communications in the Office of Management and Budget, said more than 85,000 ideas have come in from federal employees during the past four years. “We know these…