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If Sally travels from point A to point B on a train for 3 hours and Theo travels from point B to point C on a plane for 4 hours but stops to eat in the terminal for half an hour...

No, this isn't your high school math class. This brainteaser is courtesy of the government's complex rules on compensatory time off for travel. The new time-off regulations came in response to provisions in the 2004 Federal Workforce Flexibility Act, and they went into effect in January 2005.

To aid in solving this regulation-cum-algorithm, the Office of Personnel Management recently released a new fact sheet clarifying the rules. Here are some basics:

• Comp time for travel is time spent for travel that is not otherwise compensable. If, for example, you travel during work hours, it's considered to be otherwise compensable by your regular pay, and thus not eligible.
• Comp time for travel can never be used if the employee is eligible for overtime. Even if an employee exceeds the biweekly premium pay cap with a large number of overtime hours, the employee is not eligible for travel comp time because it still is considered to be otherwise compensable.
• Time spent eating meals is not eligible for comp time. That includes meals taken at an airport while waiting for a flight. OPM considers this to be time that you would have spent eating a meal elsewhere, and so does not compensate for it.
• Regular commuting time is deducted from travel comp time. If you travel to an airport from your home in the morning, you must deduct the amount of time you normally use to commute to work. The exception is if you travel from work to an airport, for example; that time is considered compensable.
• Employees and agencies need to keep track of comp time in either 6-minute or 15-minute increments.
• No cash payment will be made for travel comp time, but there is no limit on the amount of compensatory time off that you can take.
• If a waiting period is so long that it allows employees to sleep, rest or "otherwise use the time for his or her own purposes," such as an overnight delay for a flight, that time cannot be counted toward comp time.

Confused yet? Here's a sample, provided by OPM, of a travel scenario with creditable and noncreditable comp times.

In total, this employee had 13 hours of travel, four and a half of which were during regular working hours, two of which were traveling to or from home, and a half-hour spent eating. That leaves the employee with six compensable travel hours.

COMMENTS

• At least now it is possible to get some comp time for travel outside normal working hours. I spent 40 years wishing that were so. The complexities are sometimes stupid, and frustrating; but the simple form = no comp time = was far worse. Now, if only the contractors to DoD and other government agencies were to follow the same rules.... Dan Zimsen Posted September 17, 2005 11:48 PM
• At least where I work, we'll still travel on our own time & with no compensation. Since this is a regulation with cannot or will not be enforced at the local levels; these new rules change nothing for me at my workplace. We're [exempt] professionals, so we don't have a union here to discuss this issue with our management. GovExec.com reader Posted September 16, 2005 11:18 AM
• The reluctance of the federal government to compensate its employees for travel during personal time is one of the nasty little details that make federal employees secondclass citizens. I spent several years as an instructor first with the Navy and then with DAU. The group I was with didn't have a "brick schoolhouse" so for years all of our training was conducted at DOD facilities all across the country. All of our courses began at 8AM Monday and finished Friday afternoon. Needless to say we all were required to travel on Sundays to the training location and return either late into the evening's on Friday which often became early Saturday mornings. Travel from the east coast to LA is an all-day journey usually exceeding an eight-hour day once you get the rental car and make the 90 mile drive to wherever. Return trips were just as bad, the Friday night flights from west to east often got you back home by 11 AM the next morning, and that's in good weather. The amount of personal time that my fellow co-workers and I "donated" to the government over the years probably amounts to several months for each one of us. The truly discouraging aspect was that any attempt to be compensated for our travel during personal time led supervisors to a chorus of: "You're a federal employee, and federal employees don't get paid for travel," or "You're doing it because you're a professional," or "Didn't I tell you not to bring this topic up? If you don't like it find another job." Unfortunately, pleadings to be compensated for the one resource we owned - our time - often resulted in the complainer being labeled a troublemaker and a malcontent. For years it was the 800 pound gorilla that management tried to avoid, and cringed every time one of us brought the topic up. Not paying an employee for time spent because of the job, amounts to theft. And those federal employees who are required to spend their Sundays and Saturdays in airline terminals or planes without compensation are having their pay reduced, and that is unjust. J S Rush Posted September 16, 2005 5:12 AM