Human Capital: Continued Opportunities Exist for FDA and OPM to Improve Oversight of Recruitment, Relocation, and Retention Incentives

As part of its Strategic Human Capital Plan for 2010-2012 (issued in September 2010), FDA identified goals and objectives related to its recruitment and retention activities and the use of 3R incentives to help achieve these goals. For example, FDA included a goal to retain qualified employees to accomplish the FDA's mission with a supporting objective to use 3Rs to support new hiring, to fill key vacancies and to facilitate the retention of employees possessing mission critical skills in centers and offices. Performance measures to achieve this goal and objective include: review and revise the need and the use of 3Rs, and establish agencywide indicators for tracking the progress of 3R incentives. According to an FDA official, while formal indicators have not been developed, FDA monitors the progress of 3R incentives by, among other things, conducting annual reviews of these incentives to see how they have impacted the agency's recruitment and retention of employees and marketability analyses to compare salaries of FDA employees with comparable organizations outside the federal government.

In April 2011, FDA updated the guidance section on its retention incentive form on how to award retention incentives to employees. Specifically, FDA now states that retention incentives are paid to recipients on a bi-weekly basis; therefore, a service agreement is not required. Also, FDA now includes the conditions for termination of a retention incentive including, among others, demotion or separation for cause, insufficient funds, performance rating less than "fully successful", and that the agency may unilaterally terminate a retention incentive based solely on the management needs of the agency.

According to FDA officials, FDA staff from the office that oversees the administration of 3R incentives coordinates with FDA program staff to ensure that incentive actions are properly documented and that actions submitted to the Office of Human Resources are properly processed. Since the time of our review, the Office of Human Resources has implemented a "hard stop" mechanism to ensure that payments of incentives automatically terminate upon the not to exceed date of the retention incentive in order to help reduce overpayments and processing errors. In its April 2011 update to its retention incentive form, FDA added in its instructions that the effective and expiration dates of the retention incentive will be filled out by the administrating office after the FDA Commissioner has approved the request, which was not clearly stated in the version of the incentive form during the time of our review.

In August 2013, OPM issued final regulations for recruitment, relocation, and retention incentives to improve oversight of recruitment and retention incentive determinations, among other things. As part of the revisions, OPM added succession planning to the list of factors an agency must consider before approving a retention incentive, if applicable, for an employee who would be likely to leave the federal service in the absence of the incentive. OPM stated that specifically listing this factor in the regulations will strengthen the relationship between succession planning and retention incentives.

In September 2013, in response to our recommendation, HHS revised its recruitment, relocation, and retention (3R) incentive policy to address needed changes. Specifically, HHS's 3R incentive policy now includes the mandatory termination condition for retention incentives when no service agreement is required due to the employee being demoted or separated for cause or the employee receiving a rating of less than "fully successful", as well as the requirement for annually reviewing retention incentives administered without a service agreement. We had identified these requirements as missing from HHS's 3R incentive policy at the time of our report.