Probes Find Improper Use of Religious Comp Time

Rule Violations by Federal Agencies or Individual Employees Can Mean Big Payouts for Workers

When Mark Elengold retired as a top government drug regulator in 2005, he received $18,733 in his final paycheck, on top of his normal salary. The money was not a bonus, overtime pay or compensation for unused vacation hours. Rather, it was for time he had reserved to go to synagogue but had not actually used for that purpose during his three-decade career.

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In bureaucratic parlance, Elengold's payment was for "religious compensation time," a little-known benefit created by a 1978 law that allows civilian federal employees to work small amounts of overtime, bank those hours and use them to take time off for religious observances without spending their vacation leave.

While the goals of the law were broadly supported at the time and have been promoted by the Bush administration, government and congressional investigators have found evidence in recent years that the religious benefit has sometimes been used improperly to pad vacation time and retirement cash-outs.

Early in the Bush administration, the Navy determined that three civilian managers in Rhode Island had accrued hundreds of hours of religious leave and used the time to play golf, gamble, run marathons and travel to Europe. They banked their regular vacation leave so that they would be eligible for large cash payouts upon retirement.

Asked whether he considered a golf tournament to be a religious observance, one of the workers told Navy investigators: "They could be for some people."

This fall, congressional investigators found that many workers in the Food and Drug Administration had been allowed to accrue or carry over religious leave in higher amounts than agency rules allowed. More than two dozen workers who changed jobs or retired were paid for unused portions of that leave, records obtained by The Washington Post show.

Religious comp time "is not intended to be used as a cash cow for retiring FDA bureaucrats," said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce investigative subcommittee, which discovered the FDA problems. "To abuse this privilege as a moneymaking scam is an insult to men and women of faith." Rep. Joe L. Barton (Tex.), the Energy and Commerce Committee's senior Republican, has expressed similar concerns.

The agency's rules state that employees may accrue religious comp hours during a narrow window of time -- no more than four pay periods or eight workweeks. They must identify in writing the specific religious observances they plan to use the time for, and they must expend all the banked hours at such observances before accruing new religious leave.

The 1978 law that created religious comp time makes no mention of taking money for unused time and expressly states that federal employees can attend religious events "in lieu of overtime pay." Regulations that the government created later, however, state that workers can receive money for unused portions of religious comp time when they change jobs or retire.

FDA officials said they are investigating how some workers accrued large balances of such time. "We've determined some employees did earn the leave inappropriately. And if the leave was not used in the last year, those balances may be taken away from them," said Kimberly Holden, the FDA's assistant commissioner for management.

In 2001, one month after President Bush took office, his administration established a Web site that touted religious comp time and explicitly informed federal workers that they could receive pay for unused religious comp time when they left their jobs.

It also promoted the leave in other ways, including sending out reminders that workers could use the time for religious observances such as those surrounding the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005. The Justice Department also extended the benefit to its part-time workers that year.