Half of employees will be off NSPS by end of June

More than 100,000 employees on the Pentagon's National Security Personnel System will move back to the General Schedule by the end of June, the program office tasked with shutting down the pay-for-performance system said in a plan outlined on its website.

The NSPS program office said in February that most of the 219,000 employees would be back in their old pay systems by October. According to the plan, nearly 170,000 employees will be in the GS system by then, with the majority coming in May and June. The Web document said 50,728 employees will make the transition in May, and 44,115 will follow in June. More than 1,000 employees are moving back this month; 27,226 will return to the GS in August, and the last group of 29,729 will follow in September.

The program office estimated that 75 percent of the NSPS workforce will return to the General Schedule. Seven percent eventually will go back into a demonstration project for employees in the acquisition workforce, 7 percent will join a new demonstration project based in military laboratories, and another 7 percent will go back to a personnel system for health care workers. Less than 1 percent will rejoin a Navy alternate personnel system. Employees who are not returning to the General Schedule will be transferred into alternate personnel systems after 2010.

In addition, the program office announced that 98.6 percent of NSPS employees received ratings of 3 or above in a possible score of 5 in their 2009 performance evaluations. About 54 percent of employees earned ratings of 3; 40 percent earned 4s; and 5 percent received the top score of 5. Only 1 percent of employees received marks of 2, and less than 1 percent were given the bottom mark of 1.

The pay pool shares for employees rated 3 and above averaged 1.7 percent of base pay salary, according to the program office. The average payout for those employees was 4.26 percent, 2.38 percent of which was paid out in raises to base salary while 1.88 percent was awarded as bonuses.