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THE CASE FOR FEDERAL PERFORMANCE BONUS TRANSPARENCY
prologue The federal government doled out $1.5 billion in bonuses last year (FY2016) but disclosed just $351 million to the American taxpayers footing the bill. What’s missing? Approximately $1.1 billion in performance bonuses are withheld from disclosure due to anti-transparency language inserted into government union contracts. In fiscal year 2016, we audited the federal data on the 330,000 employees who received federal incentive, recruitment, relocation, and retention bonuses. We found numerous examples of waste. For example, the largest disclosed bonus didn’t go to a rocket scientist or a doctor researching the cure to cancer. Instead, it went to the human resources manager at a small land management agency in San Francisco, California, called Presidio Trust, for $141,525. Imagine the wasteful practices we’d find if performance bonuses – the largest portion of federal bonuses – weren’t completely hidden from the American public. Government unions inserted anti-transparency language into their contracts, arguing that performance awards are usually a percentage of an employee’s annual salary, varying by performance rating, and disclosure could allow taxpayers to guess the employee’s rating. However, we already have some insight into federal performance ratings. It turns out federal bureaucrats give themselves stratospheric job performance ratings, which, in turn, fatten the pay and bonus levels. A Government Accountability Office audit published last summer – using 2013 data – revealed that 99.6 percent of all federal workers received “fully successful” job performance ratings. Of course, that’s impossible. Don Devine, director of the White House Office of Personnel Management during the Reagan administration, noted that’s a higher rating than the advertised purity of Ivory soap (99.3 percent). Regardless, the pattern helps explain why taxpayers are forced to fund more than a billion dollars in federal bonuses. It’s our money, and we should be able to see which federal employees receive bonuses, for how much, at which agencies.
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