Two-Thirds Of Federal Workers Get a Bonus

"We don't recognize people if they don't do a good job," Davis said.

White House officials say there is plenty of room for improvement across the government.

Clay Johnson III, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, said the large number of awards did not surprise him. Johnson said he could even envision a revamped system rewarding roughly the same percentage of workers with bonuses -- but only if top performers got substantially more than those who were merely competent.

"You hear anecdotes where bonuses are divided up equally across all employees. I don't know that to be the case, but you hear those stories," Johnson said. "And yet you hear other stories about the great lengths that agencies go to to determine bonuses and awards. But we do want a system that has a more conscious, formal link between someone's formal performance evaluation and how that performance is recognized."

A 2002 survey by the Office of Personnel Management found that many federal workers are unhappy with the bonus system. Only 47 percent of workers said awards depend on how well employees do their jobs. Fewer than a third said their organization's awards program gave them an incentive to perform their best.

"Those numbers are not numbers to be proud of," said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, which promotes government service.

Warren Joseph, 54, a lawyer in the Internal Revenue Service's Office of Chief Counsel, said bonuses don't always track with performance. A GS-14 who earns more than $96,000 a year, Joseph said his bonuses steadily declined -- from $1,500 in 2001, to $900 the next year, to $700 in 2003 -- even though his annual performance evaluation improved every year. Other employees in the same pay grade who had similar evaluations sometimes got bonuses double or triple the size of his, he said.

"I don't see employees who are just merely average getting the awards," Joseph said. "It's more the lack of correlation between the amount of the award and the performance that seems to be totally mysterious."

In the private sector, bonuses tend to be rarer but bigger, one analyst said. Laura Sejen, a compensation expert at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a human resources consulting firm, said private awards often are in the 7 to 10 percent range, but only two-thirds of workers would be eligible for bonus plans in a typical company. So a far smaller share of the private sector workforce is likely to get an award in any given year.

"The amount that is at stake, or the potential opportunity, will be much greater," Sejen said. "Now what comes with that is a greater degree of risk. . . . In any given year, maybe about half of people eligible for a plan are going to see their full target bonus as an award. In the year in question, 2002, we were still in the thick of the soft economy then, and bonus awards took a dramatic drop."

The Post obtained bonus data for 2002, the most recent year for which records were available. The Post and Washingtonpost.com analyzed the records across agencies and occupational categories and discussed the data with personnel experts inside and outside government. The analysis found:

• Workers were more likely to get a bonus if they were in the upper reaches of the General Schedule, the government's 15-grade pay system. Bonuses were awarded to nearly three out of four workers above the GS-11 level, where salaries ranged from $49,959 to $107,357. But they went to only 57 percent of employees below the GS-8 level, where workers earned $40,551 or less. General schedule workers typically are in white-collar occupations.

• Looked at another way, more than 64 percent of employees who earned $80,000 a year or more got such awards, compared with 55 percent of workers who earned less than $40,000 annually.

• It helped, slightly, to be a manager. About 67 percent of managers got bonuses, compared with 61 percent of non-managers.