Probes Find Improper Use of Religious Comp Time

The Office of Personnel Management says it does not track the use of religious leave, does not monitor for abuse and cannot estimate how many such hours the federal workforce accrues annually. "There are no government-wide requirements for tracking or reporting" the retention or use of religious comp time, spokesman Peter Graves said.

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The lack of oversight troubles investigators on Stupak's subcommittee, who found that the FDA was not following its own rules about when and how often workers could bank religious comp time. Agency documents reviewed by The Post show that workers often used the leave without identifying a religious observance, as required.

Holden said FDA managers are updating the rules and are taking a refresher course. "I think there are some people who misinterpreted this compensatory time," she said. "We need to be a little more clear about what is going to be required."

FDA payroll records show that about 120 employees had more than 16 hours of religious leave banked. At the beginning of this year, at least 11 workers had unused balances in excess of 50 hours. And many were allowed to keep accumulating hours despite having large balances.

Joseph A. Biviano, now an associate director of management at the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), started 2006 with 243 hours of unused religious leave and was permitted to bank an additional 98.75 hours last year without expending any of the previous time. In January, the balance was converted to cash when Biviano was promoted, resulting in a $20,658 payout.

Biviano said he questioned the payment as soon as it showed up in his check in January. He repaid more than $13,000 of the money -- the net amount after taxes -- in April, about a month after congressional investigators first raised questions with the FDA about religious comp time being converted to money. Officials said the delay was caused by the FDA's payroll system.

Biviano declined to be interviewed about why he accrued so much religious leave and did not use it. But in a statement e-mailed to The Post through an agency spokeswoman, he said the payment in January was a "payroll error."

"I have never used any of the religious comp time. I want to make sure that is clear that I did not intentionally do anything to implement the payment of religious comp time to me," his statement said.

Elengold, who retired in 2005 as deputy director of CBER, said that he had banked hundreds of hours of religious comp time while working on a single project in the 1980s that required long overtime, and that he expended only about 40 hours each year for the major Jewish holidays. When he retired, he still had 192 hours in unused religious leave and was paid for it.

"When I got my last check, it was just there," he said in an interview. Though he was a manager for most of his FDA career, Elengold said that he was never told the rules governing religious comp time and that no one ever objected to his large leave balance.

"During the 20 years I was carrying that balance, if someone said to me that I should never have been credited, it wouldn't be an issue now. I sat through a lot of 'time and attendance' training classes, and it was never flagged. And they converted a couple of times, while I was there, to new time and leave systems, and it was never flagged then either."

At least 31 FDA employees have received payouts for unused religious comp time since 2002, the FDA told Congress. Biviano's and Elengold's were the largest; most of the other checks were less than $2,000.