EXCLUSIVE: Joni Ernst Demands Watchdog Investigate Federal Bureaucrats Over Remote Work ‘Abuses’

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