Read summaries of court cases and decisions that impact federal employees and retirees.
HHS was ordered to hire a veteran and to compute back pay where the agency conceded that it would have selected a veteran had it not made an error in removing his name from the list of candidates for a competitive service position.
A surviving widow of a retired federal employee tried without success to convince OPM, the MSPB and the appeals court that her deceased husband had provided her a survivor’s annuity.
The courts have been chipping away at employees’ privacy rights, particularly with regard to email on the clock. Some of these issues are being given a second look.
After 30 years under the Federal labor law, the FLRA has ruled for the first time that personnel specialists are in a bargaining unit as their work is routine.
A cashier at an Air Force commissary was found to be in a “non-critical sensitive” position. She was fired and the MSPB concluded that her removal was analogous to a removal for not having a security clearance.
An employee fired after 17 years of federal service argued he was acting in his role as a union official and not as an agency official when being interviewed by the agency’s Office of Internal Affairs. Two specifications supporting one charge of conduct unbecoming were found to be enough to uphold his removal.
A mailroom worker for SSA got caught up in a fraudulent income tax scheme apparently sponsored by a co-worker. While under investigation, the agency promoted the employee who now had access to a database of Social Security numbers. The employee was fired but a federal court sends the case back to the MSPB for a new decision.
To have jurisdiction in a federal court, a federal employee must show that he exhausted his administrative remedies by allowing the agency and/or EEOC to process the case.
Four Transportation Security Administration employees were not able to convince a court that their agency violated the Privacy Act when an agency hard drive with personal information on some 100,000 TSA employees went missing.
A federal employee reached a settlement with the Army under which he resigned and the agency would rescind the removal for cause from his personnel records. He filed another appeal, created a public record, and got a decision that the Army had done what it agreed to do.
