Government Paid Leave

Here is an excerpt from an article on the cost of government employees on paid leave:

Take, for example, the 62-page report released last month by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative agency that works for Congress. The GAO found that between 2011 and 2013, the federal government spent more than $775 million to keep tens of thousands of employees on paid leave for weeks, months, or even years. Longstanding government personnel rules, affirmed repeatedly in rulings by the comptroller general, expressly limit paid leave to “rare circumstances” in which an employee’s presence in the workplace is considered a threat to people or property. Nonetheless, GAO tallied more than 57,000 civilian employees who were put on paid “administrative leave” for at least 30 days – hundreds of them for as much as three years.

“While the employees stayed home, they not only collected paychecks but also built their pensions, vacation, and sick days, and moved up the federal pay scale,” reported The Washington Post. And the GAO couldn’t help understating the true cost of paid leave; it had data “for only about three-fifths of the federal workforce since not all government agencies keep track of the practice.”

The reason so many federal workers were paid not to work? Generally because they were being investigated for misconduct or criminal acts, and it was easier to pay them to stay away then to fire them, suspend them without pay, or reassign them to other tasks until their case was resolved. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn describes it as “Paid Vacations for Bureaucrats Gone Wild” in his most recent “Wastebook,” an annual compilation of fiscal dissipation and squandered tax dollars. Coburn’s summary crystallizes the egregiousness of a practice that managers at many government agencies have come to take for granted:

According to the Government Accountability Office, the federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars on paid leave for countless civilian employees who are being investigated for misconduct or criminal acts.

“Charging booze and personal trips on the office credit card. Passing out on the job after a late night partying. Wasting most of the work day surfing for smut on office computers.… Any one of these outrageous behaviors would be reason enough for most to be fired … unless, of course, you are on the federal government’s payroll, in which case you might instead get a paid vacation lasting months or even years.” The promiscuous use of paid leave is only one of 100 bizarre, infuriating, or frivolous expenditures detailed in Coburn’s “Wastebook.”