COVID-19 was a catalyst for change in many aspects of daily life, most notably teleworking, which numerous companies and governments have adopted as the new norm.
Working from home has been subject to both criticism and praise; the teleworking practice demonstrated its benefits for the worker over the past two years, but productivity benefiting the company or institution is still up for debate. Recently, the Functional Government Initiative (FGI) published a report “Is Teleworking Enabling Fraud?” outlining key statistics alluding to federal employees taking advantage of the telework system.
“Given what we know surrounding the federal government’s oversight on telework and how employees have appeared to abuse this in the past, these numbers suggest this particular COVID-driven policy may be having significant negative implications for waste, fraud and abuse,” FGI communications director Pete McGinnis said in a statement. “These discoveries must be formally investigated so that we can know for sure if time and attendance requirements are being followed and, if not, how agencies plan on ensuring telework policies don't continue to cause waste, fraud and abuse.”
For its report, the FGI utilized the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the aggregate leave totals for calendar years 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 for 24 federal agencies. FGI’s analysis found a significant decline in the use of both sick leave and annual leave. Annual leave declined >15% and sick leave declined 30% from 2018 to 2020. The report indicated that these trends continued through 2021.
Every agency analyzed experienced a decline in sick leave use in 2021 compared to 2018. The two agencies that saw the greatest decline being the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities and Ex-Im Bank, down by more than 50%. Eight other agencies saw a decline of more than 30%.
One of the points the report made was if employees continue to take time off without using leave it could have a drastic effect on the American taxpayer. Using the aggregate leave totals acquired from the federal agencies and average federal hourly pay rates, the FGI report was able to estimate the amount accrued in leave since 2018. In annual leave, nearly $600 million of base pay has been collected and in sick leave $845 million has been collected in base pay totaling more than $1.4 billion.
The report concluded that "vigorous oversight and analysis is necessary" to prevent employee fraud and abuse.
This is not the first investigation FGI has conducted into the telework matter. Back in June, FGI obtained an internal memorandum from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that had analyzed sign-in data of the department’s employees. The memo conveyed that on any given day from March through December in 2020, between 20% to 30% of HHS employees did not appear to be working.
The Washington Beacon reported in August that four federal agencies stated that they had no specific oversight of remote employees: The Department of the Interior, Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Housing and Urban Development.
