Conventional wisdom holds that Title 5, the part of the U.S. code that defines the civil service system, provides federal agencies with enough wiggle room to address difficult hiring and pay problems.
The law, for example, permits bonuses of up to 25 percent of base salary for recruiting, retaining or relocating an employee. It also includes provisions that permit agencies to pay salaries above the norm when they need to hire highly educated and talented people.
But there's widespread feeling across agencies that these alternatives come with too many strings attached, especially from budget offices, and frequently prove too cumbersome. As a result, agencies regularly complain that they should be free of Title 5 and be able to design a personnel system tailored to their needs.
In a new study, Hal G. Rainey, a University of Georgia professor, finds encouraging signs that recent Title 5 exemptions have helped four agencies fill critical executive and technical jobs and prompted them to pay more attention to recruiting. His study was published this month by the PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government and is available at www.endowment.pwcglobal.com.
Rainey looks at the personnel revisions adopted at the Federal Aviation Administration, the Patent and Trademark Office, the Education Department's Office of Student Financial Assistance and the Internal Revenue Service.
A large part of Rainey's report describes the use of "critical pay" jobs at the IRS. For those jobs, agencies may offer higher salaries than those paid to career federal executives to help recruit experts in technical and professional fields.
Congress authorized the IRS to create 40 such positions at salaries up to the rate paid the vice president, $186,300. The agency has 33 critical pay employees on board, with 27 of them earning more than the secretary of the treasury, who is paid $161,200.
There's a good chance the IRS model could spread across the government. Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) and Rep. Constance A. Morella (R-Md.) have introduced legislation, which might be debated early next year, to permit agencies to set up a limited number of critical pay positions to attract top mid-career private-sector managers. The Voinovich-Morella proposal, at the agency level, would create one critical pay position for every 3,000 employees.
A key part of the congressional debate will probably focus on equity issues. As Rainey says in his report, "If two people in the system are doing essentially the same work, but one gets paid a lot more, that is unfair. Should one agency have special opportunities and advantages in managing their operations that others do not have?"
Supporters of critical pay would say yes, he writes, because "they face the challenge to improve now and cannot afford to wait until some broad, overall policy is developed and adopted."
At the IRS, officials believe that the use of critical pay authority to make four-year appointments complements the civil service framework. The hiring process uses executive search firms to identify job candidates. The IRS negotiates a compensation package with each hire.
"The concept of being able to bring people in for a specific period of time to work on a specific job fits nicely between the concept and definition of career senior executives and political appointees," one IRS official said.
The expertise coming into the IRS will help improve the agency's performance and give career executives a chance to learn from others' experiences, the official said.
Because the critical pay program is relatively new, it has drawn varied responses.
The high pay and wide leeway afforded in this type of hiring have produced some grumbling among longtime IRS employees. An analysis in the Oct. 29 issue of Tax Notes, a weekly magazine, questions whether some executives could have been hired at standard pay rates instead and "wonders what real impact they have had on the IRS."
Rainey, in turn, finds that the IRS "puts forth a good case for the qualifications of the people hired for critical pay positions and the rationale for bringing them to IRS."
Rainey favors expanding special hiring programs but cautions agencies to use them carefully. "This includes making provisions for accountability and transparency but doing so creatively, so that agencies do not reinstitute the constraints that necessitated these authorities in the first place."
Stephen Barr's e-mail address is barrs@washpost.com.
