Agencies relocated nearly 60,000 employees in 2003

Federal agencies relocated 59,265 white-collar workers in fiscal 2003, including more than 43,000 civilians and 16,000 military personnel, according to Office of Personnel Management figures gathered from more than 100 agencies.

The Agriculture Department moved the most employees, 7,275, followed by the Army with 6,830 and the Homeland Security Department with 5,633. More employee relocations occurred during the fourth-quarter of fiscal 2003 than any other, with 16,881 moves. The fewest occurred during the second-quarter, with 12,740.

Criminal investigators were relocated most often, with 3,939 moves, followed by 2,178 foreign affairs personnel. General Schedule employees accounted for about 76 percent of the moves. The largest grades were GS-12, with 7,843 employees, followed by 6,752 GS-11s and 6,731 GS-13s.

The relocation data was presented by Jerry Mikowicz, manager of OPM's salary and wage systems group, at Wednesday's Governmentwide Relocation Advisory Board meeting. Mikowicz is chairman of the board's administrative and management subcommittee.

The advisory board, which is made up of government and private industry representatives, is preparing to recommend changes to federal relocation rules in a September report.

Mikowicz said the data does not answer questions about how much agencies spend on relocating workers posed by the General Services Administration and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, but it does show which agencies move the most people, which employees are being relocated and when the moves are occurring.

The data "gives us a framework," Mikowicz said. "This gives me a flavor for all the people affected."

Previous data for 2003 from an Office of Management and Budget draft report estimated that there were about 22,000 civilian relocations and 706,000 Defense Department relocations at a cost of more than $4 billion. This most recent report looks solely at white-collar workers, which would exclude many Pentagon relocations.

OMB officials and lawmakers are pressuring agencies through GSA to gather and report governmentwide employee relocation costs.

It is difficult to produce a governmentwide figure on the amount spent relocating employees, according to Mikowicz, because many records are manually documented or are fragmented in different areas of an agency.

A solution to that problem would be to implement expense-tracking systems, said Edward Mahaney, associate director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

"Generally speaking, agencies don't have cost management software," Mahaney said. "Agencies have difficulty tracking the data … they need to have the tools to manage it better."

Mahaney said agencies within a department should contract with private industry for this task, with the agency that does the most employee relocations leading the effort. A governmentwide cost management system for relocation is unnecessary, according to Mahaney, and there are a number of private sector companies that could compete for the agencies' services.

• 1st Quarter 14,968
• 2nd Quarter 12,740
• 3rd Quarter 14,676
• 4th Quarter 16,881