A new audit from the Inspector General for the Department of Housing and Urban Development revealed potential discrepancies involving over 10% of telework agreements.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa requested in August 2023 that government agencies conduct audits of telework and remote work, citing a media account of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee who attended a staff meeting while taking a bubble bath. The HUD report, released Tuesday, found that several employees lived over 2,000 miles from the offices they were supposed to work in.
“Five of these employees had Flexiplace agreements indicating that they commuted more than 2,000 miles every week from one side of the United States to the other or from the mainland United States to Hawaii,” the report said.
HUD established the Flexiplace program to regulate remote and telework in 2022, defining teleworkers as employees who report to the office on a set number of days and remote workers as employees who don’t show up at an office, according to the report. The report also noted that at least 30 employees lived more than 1,000 miles away from their on-site work location, while another 35 did not have valid data.
“The calendar just flipped to October, but with so many ghost employees and haunted empty halls, it has been spooky season at the Biden-Harris HUD office buildings for four years,” Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This audit has unveiled a true house of horrors for taxpayers. Federal employees need to get back to work and stop treating the office like a werewolf treats sunlight.”
Flipping through channels with a remote is not the same as remote work.
It’s time we get Washington bureaucrats off their couches and back in the office.
Our taxpayers deserve better. pic.twitter.com/IfEJHCGYRT
— Joni Ernst (@SenJoniErnst) September 7, 2023
The report also found issues with scheduling work hours and in-office days for employees who had signed Flexiplace agreements.
“We identified 66 of 7,710 agreements (1 percent) with schedules that differed from the agreement types, were missing, or did not match full-time work,” the report stated. “The largest group of discrepancies included 41 employees with regular telework agreements who scheduled fewer than the 2 in-office days per pay period that HUD requires for regular teleworkers.”
Ernst noted in an August 28 letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan that about one in four government buildings had water contaminated with the bacteria that causes Legionnaires disease due to the amount of unused office space.
The inspector general’s office recommended that HUD take steps to reduce the risk of the agency making improper locality payments and to ensure that their official duty stations were correct, according to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by the DCNF, which the HUD said it will implement.
Ernst introduced the Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems (SHOW UP) Act, in 2023 as part of a package of legislation to rein in the “administrative state.”
Acting Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Adrienne Todman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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