Bonuses: Who needs them?

When 60 percent of your students in a class of 1.6 million get an A, either you’ve got a very bright class, a very generous teacher or something may be wrong with the system.

When you give a top manager a $90,000 bonus one year, then fire him for incompetence the next, something may be wrong with the system.

When a federal agency gives bonuses to 90 percent of its employees, it is either an exceptional, walks-on-water outfit, or something may be wrong with the system.

Uncle Sam spends lots and lots of money giving employees awards and bonuses. Some of them are modest, a couple of hundred bucks in one year. Others are big-time, like the once-golden-now-reassigned Transportation Security Agency official who got $90,000 spread over a 9-month period in 2015, only to get moved out of his slot last month.

In 2004, The Washington Post reported that two of every three non-postal federal workers got a bonus. It said the bonuses ranged from less than $100 to more than $25,000 (in 2002 dollars) with the average being the equivalent of 1.6 percent of salary. By coincidence, that’s the amount of the proposed 2017 raise for white-collar feds.

The Post’s report found that three agencies — the General Services Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy — were especially generous in giving bonuses to workers. At GSA, where 9 out of 10 employees got bonuses, an official defended it by telling the Post “who is to say that those 90 percent didn’t all merit awards?” Indeed.

Bonuses are hard to define. When trying to make a case that there are too many, critics often include WIG (within grade raises) in the category. The so-called in grades or longevity steps are semi-automatic. Employees performing satisfactorily get one every one, two or three years, depending on where they are in their 10-step grade. The WIGs equal a 3 percent pay raise. During the Jimmy Carter administration, there was a serious effort to eliminate the WIGs. They were dubbed “BEING THERE” awards because, as a political appointee quipped, all people had to do to get one of the raises was “show up, and not #^#! up.”

More recently the GOP-led House has tried to reduce or eliminate bonuses in specific agencies — like the Internal Revenue Service — and/or deny them to employees delinquent in paying their taxes.

So who gets bonuses? And how are the winners chosen? We asked around:

• One high-ranking fed, now in the private sector, said “the system was simple. The highest-grade employee who was due to retire that year got a bonus.” He described it as a “golden handshake.”

• Another employee said that in his regulatory agency, “it seems most of the people we heard of… who got bonuses were lawyers” who were skilled in writing and “making themselves look good.”

• A retired Nuclear Regulatory Commission professional said one year his boss gave a bonus to “absolutely the worst employee in the group. She was a disaster.” He said when he asked his boss why the loser was chosen as a winner, he was told the bonus was an “attempt to motivate her” to do better. Did it work, I asked? Nope, he replied.

So how about your place? Is the bonus/merit raise program a motivator or a joke? Got some examples either way. All responses will be kept confidential — but if you tell us we will tell all: mcausey@federalnewsradio.com

Nearly Useless Factoid

By David Thornton

1.6 percent is also the proportion of Americans who identify as Mormon, according to the 2014 Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Survey.

Source: Pew Research Center

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