Lawmakers, GAO head Walker spar over compensation plan

Lawmakers and Government Accountability Office (GAO) head David Walker sparred yesterday while discussing a pay-for-performance plan initiated last year.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) was Walker’s harshest critic during a joint hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia subcommittee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia subcommittee.

{mosads}“The committee should note that this was a grand experiment in a compensation system that has gotten the agency a union,” Norton said, referencing that half of the 1,500 analysts recently filed for a union election. “It’s hard to call what we have now a success.”

“We don’t have a union and we may never have a union,” Walker said.

Norton added that there may have been some racial discrimination in the process: “I am very concerned that the matter has been complicated by matters of racial disparities,” she said.

Chairman Danny Davis (D-Ill.) also noted that employee ratings were central to who was — and who was not — placed into the higher pay band.

“It would appear that African-Americans at GAO have been harmed by the restructuring, and this brings into question the fairness and credibility of GAO’s performance management system,” Davis said, requesting that an employee advisory board survey all employees on the restructuring.

Davis questioned Walker about his promise to give an annual cost-of-living increase to all employees with “meets expectations” ratings. Last year, 17 percent of employees who had met expectations were denied increases.

“Certain members believe I promised something that I did not promise,” Walker said. “[Sometimes it’s] best to do what’s right for all of GAO employees, not for some of GAO employees. When making tough transformations you can’t make everybody happy.

“No agency head talks to employees more than I do,” Walker added, noting that he held a closed-circuit chat with all employees prior to the split and no one asserted that he was breaking his promise.

He said that this year, 139 employees did not get cost-of-living increases, down from last year’s 308, and all but two did not receive market-based compensation.

Walker said every employee would receive performance-based raises before his term is up. Additionally, many employees are able to make more than they would have under the federal government’s system.

The general counsel of the GAO’s Personnel Appeals Board, Ann Wagner, told the panel that the restructuring constituted demotions and the “stated cause for demotions was not substantiated by the GAO.”

Placement in the lower level, Band II A, meant a reduction in rate because employees would not get an annual adjustment nor would they be eligible for the higher rate, Wagner said.

Although Walker has told Congress that he based the Band II split on the results of a Watson Wyatt study, Davis told the committee that the Band II split came out of a job questionnaire administered by Personnel Decisions Research Institute in 2000.

In fact, when the GAO contacted Watson Wyatt, it requested compensation ranges for two levels of analysts, when at the time there was only one group of analysts.

“The fact is the idea of splitting Band II predated [the] Watson Wyatt study by approximately four years and that Watson Wyatt provided compensation ranges that reflected a split in Band II because that was what GAO asked them to do,” Davis said.

“We fight for federal employees to receive an annual across-the-board increase. It is of great concern that GAO never consulted with Congress, either before, or after, it denied GAO employees, who met expectations, their cost-of-living increase.”

Senate federal workforce panel Chairman Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) told Walker that there must be an explanation for the changes.

“We need a better understanding on how the GAO system works and its impact on employees,” Akaka said, adding that there has been a lack of transparency and employee input, an unfair process for determining placement and a failure to give employees who have been meeting expectations a raise.

Rep. Kenny Marchant (R-Texas) told Walker that “a degree of mistrust has built up between employees and this agency.”
Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) said he believed Congress was “misled.”

“Your words were clearly to the effect that everybody would get an across-the-board increase,” Lynch said. “You are the watchdog of federal government. We have to have you working together.”

Walker found an ally in Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), the federal workforce panel’s ranking member, who argued that reforms cannot be put in place overnight, and require a “change in culture.”

“I know how important and hard it is” to change to a pay-for-performance system, Voinovich said.

Gregory Junemann, the president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the union representing GAO employees, contested Walker’s claims.

“The [comptroller general] said this unionization effort was just a handful of disgruntled employees. We’ve got hundreds of employees [in all bands in every geographic location],” he told The Hill.

Junemann said the workers are not only those who were denied cost-of-living adjustments, but those who represent the “cream of the crop.”

“The pay system isn’t what’s broken; it’s the cultural system that needs to be fixed,” Junemann said.

Some analysts said yesterday that Walker is not particularly approachable. Junemann noted that while no employee went to Walker, they all talked to each other about the changes. One analyst said that most people act in response.

“There’s a reaction when there’s a hurricane, not if there’s one,” Jacqueline Harpp, a senior analyst who is black, told The Hill. When she began working at a regional branch of the agency in 1974, Harpp said her coworkers were primarily white males.

“We have had a long, tough road over those years … and then to be demoted?” Harpp said. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, and it’s still not going down well.”