One-third of employees had tenure of less than five years.

http://www.fedscope.opm.gov/

I did a quick cross-check between the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)’s federal worker database and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s recently released report on the Federal Workforce.  Because OPM’s database is transparent to a high level of detail and kept current with quarterly data, I’d give more credibility to it over the opaque annual report issued by the EEOC.

To which I say, in comparison to OPM’s personnel database, the EEOC report on federal diversity appears to be inflated by as many as 50,000 minorities.   I’ll of course need to do a little more research to explain my findings and document the methodology used.

FedScope is a powerful tool, and one highlighted on DATA.GOV.  This utility allows users to view highly detailed information crosstabulated on agencies by area, GS level, occupation, race, ethnicity and more.  With so many aspects, it’s not intuitive, but once a researcher figures out how to drill down and extract information, invaluable.

Here it is:
http://www.eeoc.gov/federal/reports/fsp2009/

Once again, it’s a busy time for me (even though it’s summer).  I’ll review and comment on it shortly and send out a news release.  If you’re not on our email distribution, fill out the form on the right hand side of your screen and it will be sent to you as part of subscription package you can subscribe and unsubscribe to/from.

I’ve run preliminary summaries for Fiscal Year 2009 case statistics on the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), and I was surprised by what I found. Give me some time to contemplate what the new numbers mean, and why the figures look different than in FY 2007 and 2008.

(My initial take was that the numbers would be similar, or perhaps even worse for federal employees during the transition to the new board.  Grundmann and Wagner took their MSPB board positions on November 5, 2009, and were not present during FY 2009, which ended on September 1 of that year. )

Not exactly a new theme. I am speaking, of course, of the Department of Veterans Affairs abandoning the men and women who served in America’s Armed Forces, and to whom the Agency purportedly serves. For those veterans who served in the Vietnam War, one of the most egregious examples of willful abandonment occurred over the issue of Agent Orange, the chemical poison that devastated the ecology of Vietnam, and equally devastated the health of all too many Vietnamese and American service members. Until very recently, the governmental agencies simply “did not want to go there”, and consistently denied that Agent Orange was the cause of the health problems being experienced by the veterans. Fast forward to the First (or was it the Second – the nomenclature is not standardized) Gulf War, whose cause was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. A principal cause of what was dubbed “the Gulf War syndrome” was the use of depleted uranium shells. Again, there was a strong denial of correlation with the health problems of veterans. Update again, to the current Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and the principal health issue appears to be PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). A major contributing factor is the constant anxiety associated with the very real fear of, and actual use of, IED’s (Improvised Explosive Devices) that sit along the side of the road, command denoted when an American military vehicle passes. A recent article at the Los Angeles Times, suitable entitled “Veterans Affairs wants to be an advocate, not the enemy” stressed that the VA is slowly (we’ll have a computerized data system for disability claims by 2015!) trying to mend its ways.

I’ve been blessed not to have had health problems associated with my military service, and have never applied for any form of compensation from the VA. But I sure could use some help over the violation of my veterans’ preference in employment by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. On November 09, 2009, Secretary Shinseki was appointed by President Obama to be the Co-Chair of the Counsel of Veterans Employment. I’ve sent him several letters in the hopes that some third undersecretary would grant me some time. Knew it was a long-shot, but still, I had won MSPB case, which should give me some “street cred”, as the expression has it. On June 03, I finally received a phone call from Mr. Chris O’Connor, who is Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary, Congressional and Legislative Affairs. The next day, as requested, I submitted a six page letter detailing the long struggle with the CDC, including the MSPB victory, and the documentation on the violation of the employment rights of numerous other veterans.

I made what I considered to be two small requests: two 10-minute phone calls. One call would preferably be from General Shinseki to Dr. Thomas Frieden, the Director of the CDC, asking him his version of events surrounding the numerous highly incriminating internal CDC e-mails that indicated systemic use of Prohibited Personnel Practices. The second phone call would be to the Office of the Special Counsel asking that they follow-up on my complaint, filed on April 06.

As the LAT article indicated, change comes slowly to the VA, but I’m still hoping to receive a response prior to 2015. In the meantime, the question becomes less tongue-in-cheek with every new letter submitted to the VA: Can one develop, and be compensated for, PTSD by fighting the VA?

- John Paul Jones
john.jones@civilservicechange.org

Request for Federal Employee Statistics on EEOC & Attorney Examiner Elements and Standards

Here is a compilation of requests for information from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  For those of you who have waited three years for me to send this, I have this to say:  It’s not hard to do, and anyone can do it.  The part that takes effort is the follow-up and dealing with some of the absurd responses that may come out of filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.  Hopefully, with a new administration, we’ll be able to bypass that unproductive step and move directly to the President’s initiative for Open Government.

Tomorrow, Scott Bloch, former head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), is scheduled to be sentenced before Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson. Bloch has pleaded guilty to one count of criminal contempt of Congress for not disclosing the nature and extent of his instructions that a private company erase files from his government-issued computer and the computers of two other Office of Special Counsel employees. As this ominous day approaches, from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel Fiscal year 2008 Annual Report, here are some highlights of Bloch’s five-year OSC career:

During his tenure, Scott Bloch reduced total matters pending at OSC by 56 percent. Statistical analysis indicates he accomplished this by having his agency throw out matters without investigating them. In Fiscal Year 2008, of 2,447 Prohibited Personnel Practice (PPP) Complaints, OSC referred six percent of them to the Complaints Examining Unit (CEU). Of these, only 88 were processed. Prohibited Personnel Practice Complaints made up 67 percent of total matters, yet only 88 of 2,447, four percent were processed by investigators.

In FY 2008, OSC obtained zero stays from the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), the quasi-judicial agency tasked with enforcing federal civil service law. In the same year, OSC filed zero corrective action petitions with MSPB.

On whistleblower disclosure activity, OSC received 530 new disclosures in FY 2008. Of these, 25 were reported to the President and Congress. That’s less than five percent that were investigated and any determination made on disclosure validity. Looking at it another way, 95 percent of whistleblower disclosures were not acknowledged by OSC.

That then, explains the record low satisfaction ratings OSC garnered in its survey of customers. Of those that responded to its survey, only 1 out of every 21 respondents obtained a satisfactory result from OSC. Moreover, more than half of respondents indicated that their complaint included allegations of whistleblowing. On a five-point scale, 200 of 220 rated OSC’s results as either dissatisfactory or very dissatisfactory.

As Scott Bloch heads for sentencing tomorrow, he leaves behind innocent victims sentenced to reprisal by his failure to protect those he was tasked to serve. Additionally, as Special Counsel William E. Reukauf’s message from OSC’s Annual Report reads, “FY 2008 was a challenging time for this small, but important, agency. Employees were called upon to respond to and cooperate with two extensive inquiries involving the then-agency head, including a grand jury investigation, and execution of search warrants on agency premises.”

From: Parker, Bernard [mailto:Bernard.Parker@mspb.gov]
Sent: Friday, July 16, 2010 1:36 PM
To: democracy@civilservicechange.org
Subject: MSPB’s Response to Your FOIA Request Dated June 23, 2010

Ms. Charlotte Yee
39120 Argonaut Way 305
Fremont, CA  94538

FOIA Tracking No. CB10 – 303

Dear Ms. Yee:

This is in response to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), request dated June 23, 2010, requesting the Merit Systems Protection Board’s (MSPB) 2009 fiscal year case processing statistics for the upcoming MSPB Annual Report for fiscal year 2009.  Your request has been processed under the MSPB’s regulations implementing the FOIA at 5 CFR Part 1204.

We have conducted a search based on the information you provided; and we are enclosing an Excel spreadsheet containing the docket number, agency, case type, appeal type, closing code, and name of the administrative judge for the appellate jurisdiction cases closed in fiscal year 2009.  That information is contained on the computer disk enclosed with this letter.

Sincerely,

William D. Spencer

Clerk of the Board

Enclosure: Computer Disk (1)

=============================

I’ve attached the file here:

When I get a chance I’ll break down the numbers by Regional Office and Administrative Judge.  Also, to clarify, FY 2009 is for the time period October 1, 2008 through September 30, 2009 and these numbers do not reflect decisions made under the new MSPB Board.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) recently received a response to their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for Attorney Examiner Elements and Standards for Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) employees.

Here’s the document.  After reading the piece, I have a better idea of what is going on with the changes at MSPB.  Carry on, Ms. (Susan Tsui) Grundmann.  You’re doing a great job so far.

About a month or so ago, the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) requested stakeholder input.  Thanks to this site’s alert readership, I had a chance to respond to their survey.  I thought I’d share with you one of the most surprising responses I had to one of their questions:

5. What is the most important change you would like to see made to improve the laws related to whistleblowing?

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think the most important change would be to promote the MSPB AJs from general attorneys to true Administrative Law Judges (ALJ) with the same rights. Additionally, the newly minted ALJ ought to be allowed to form a union, in the same way that SSA ALJ have.

That’s right.  I think that Merit Systems Protection Board Administrative Judges, whom are currently not Administrative Judges, but in actuality, Attorney Examiners, should be promoted.  Let me clarify: I don’t necessarily think that current judges should be promoted, but I do think that as Attorney Examiners leave through attrition, their positions should be upgraded to full Administrative Law Judges, with the same benefits and tenure of their DOL and SSA peers.

As it currently stands, MSPB AJs are almost always outranked by agency representatives, and they do report to the same employer — the executive branch of Federal Government.  This makes it difficult  — if not impossible — for them to render an impartial judgment.  As mislabeled AJs leave MSPB, their positions should be changed to Administrative Law Judges (ALJ).  In addition to being paid more, ALJ have higher standards of proof for removal, and more latitude to make appropriate decisions.  I further that these new ALJ ought to be permitted to join unions, just as SSA Administrative ALJ do.  Under this proposal, any AJs who wish to compete for the new ALJ positions can.  However, they will be competing against others, as the position is now more attractive to both internal and external candidates. 

FWIW, I do think there’s at least one — maybe two — current AJs that could rise by virtue of merit.  You can reach your own conclusion of what I think about the remainder.