The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management did not give formal guidance to sites on how to handle employees during the wind down of Recovery Act work, leading to the unnecessary spending of nearly $8 million at the Savannah River Site, according to a DOE Inspector General report released yesterday. The report compared the approaches taken by the Savannah River Site and Hanford during workforce reductions. EM authorized SRS to provide laid off employees with 60 days of pay instead of advance termination notices, which resulted in “unnecessary payments” of about $7.7 million under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, according to the IG. Meanwhile, Hanford employees received advance notice of termination and continued working. The IG questioned “whether disparate and significantly inconsistent treatment of contractor employees at various Department sites is fair, equitable and in the Government’s best interest. Rather than adopting a consistent approach to the notice requirement, the Department authorized its contractors to provide differing benefits by location, even though the employees at both sites were similarly situated.”
EM, for its part, “agrees with the Inspector General’s recommendations and is already taking steps to ensure appropriate approvals are in place when dealing with similar WARN Act payments in the future,” EM spokesman Colin Jones said in a written response. EM Recovery Act Director Thomas Johnson said officials plan to review the amount of notice and payments given to terminated employees, and plan to require “specific approval by senior EM management” for providing pay instead of advance notice, according to a Jan. 23 response to the IG report. “EM will continue to work with the Office of General Counsel to provide additional guidance to the sites on this topic,” Johnson wrote.
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