A senior National Weather Service official helped write the job
description and set the salary for his own post-retirement consulting
post– then came back to the office doing the same job with a $43,200
raise, the agency’s watchdog found.
The deputy chief financial
officer also demanded that he be paid a $50,000 housing allowance near
Weather Service headquarters in downtown Silver Spring in violation of
government rules for contractors, one of numerous improprieties in a
revolving-door deal sealed with full knowledge of senior agency leaders,
according to an investigation by the Commerce Department inspector general’s office.
With
his consulting job and housing allowance in place, P. Donald Jiron
retired from the Weather Service in early May 2010, then returned to
work as a consultant the next day, while collecting his government
pension, investigators said. By the time he was fired 21 months later,
the government had paid him another $471,875.34.
The
investigation made public this week does not name Jiron, who worked as a
GS-15 before his retirement and now lives in Williamsburg, Va. But
government officials familiar with the case identified him. His lawyer,
Matthew Kaiser, said in a statement, “Mr. Jiron has not done anything
wrong” because he acted “at the direction of and with the approval of
his supervisor at all times.”
The inspector general did not
dispute that, and came to an alarming conclusion about the roles of
senior officials in the Jiron deal: His procurement of his own
post-retirement job appears to be commonplace throughout the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Weather Service’s parent
agency.
“This contract may be indicative of a routine and
troubling practice at NOAA of hiring former employees as contractors
for purposes of carrying out similar duties to those they performed
prior to leaving federal service,” investigators wrote.
read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/06/05/top-weather-service-official-creates-consulting-job-then-takes-it-himself-with-43200-raise-watchdog-says/
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