HAROLD HUTCHISON
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa renewed a request Thursday to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to review the agency’s remote work policies over potential abuses and “ongoing locality pay fraud.”
Ernst, who has highlighted issues relating to telecommuting by federal employees, cited an incident of a USAID employee drawing locality pay for the Washington, D.C., area despite living full-time in Florida, according to the the letter to USAID Inspector General Paul K. Martin. Locality pay is an adjustment to the basic pay of civilian employees in the federal government intended to make sure that federal employees have comparable compensation to civilian counterparts in a given area of the country.
“You should need no reminder that there is certainly ongoing locality pay fraud at USAID,” Ernst wrote to Martin. “As your recent investigation revealed, not only did a GS-13 employee falsely use an office supply retailer’s mailing address in Virginia to defraud the taxpayer by receiving higher Washington, D.C. locality pay while living in Florida fulltime, she did so with the full knowledge and assistance of her supervisor.”
“As I am sure you would agree, just one manager knowingly facilitating timecard fraud is too many,” Ernst continued. “Further, reasonable minds would agree it is flatly implausible, at best, to suggest this GS-13 and her supervisor are the only employees engaging in this sort of fraud. At the very least, I would hope your office reviewed the agreements of all other employees under this supervisor’s purview to determine if they are also defrauding the taxpayer.”
Ernst cited reports showing that substantial percentages of employees of the Architect of the Capitol and the Department of Commerce who worked remotely were overpaid in the letter to Martin. The USAID employee in question retired before the conclusion of the probe, according to a summary posted on the USAID site April 30.
In an August 2023 letter sent to 24 government agencies requesting a review of the issues involved with telecommuting, Ernst cited a media account of a Department of Veteran’s Affairs employee who attended a staff meeting while taking a bubble bath. Ernst also cited the case involving an employee with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) who received $25,000 while spending over 730 hours at the golf course or happy hours, according to an August 2015 report by the inspector general’s office of the Commerce Department.
“Across the federal government, those Inspectors General whose offices evaluate this issue are uncovering rampant locality pay fraud, fueled by telework arranged without sufficient guardrails or oversight,” Ernst wrote. “Of note, when the Office of the Inspector General of the Architect of the Capitol analyzed its locality pay practices, it found a full 80 percent of sampled employees received incorrect locality pay. In a second recent audit, the Department of Commerce OIG found roughly a quarter of employees were improperly overpaid because they got the wrong locality pay.”
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) memo released by Sen. Ernst in December revealed that 24 agencies used less than 50% of their office space. Ernst introduced the Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems (SHOW UP) Act, in September as part of a package of legislation to rein in the “administrative state.”
“Bureaucrats at USAID were given an inch and they have taken a mile at the expense of taxpayers,” Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “There should never be a question if a federal employee is at work or relaxing on a beach 1,000 miles away on permanent vacation. We need a thorough and transparent review of workplace policy and a reset of expectations to ensure public servants are showing up to work and being paid accurately.”
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