Letters

Brian Friel's article about our company's efforts to help the Transportation Security Administration recruit and hire airport security screeners would have been more complete had he checked with us to clarify several assertions ("Human Resources: Outsource With Care," Managing Technology, April).

The article implies we did not accurately process personnel information. That is incorrect. We processed records according to TSA directives and entered information into a Transportation Department legacy system, CPMIS, which TSA chose to use. When our work was completed on the contract at the end of December and we needed to transfer work to the new contractors, we followed a TSA hand-off plan, inventoried all data in hand and identified the next steps in the ongoing processing of each item.

The article also would have benefited from some context about why the contract increased from $103 million to $700 million. First, the scope of the work changed after the contract was awarded. Rather than hiring 30,000 airport screeners, the agency ended up hiring 64,000 airport screeners, airport baggage scanning personnel, federal security directors and field management staff. The assessment process, originally conceived to be done at existing facilities, was changed to a different model that required setting up 150 temporary full-service assessment centers across the United States. All of this was done in a compressed timeframe of 10 months and met Congress' deadline.

As with any undertaking of this magnitude and timeframe, there were numerous challenges-and victories in overcoming them. By outsourcing this effort, TSA met the congressional mandate of hiring an entirely new federal airport screener force without first having to build an entire federal HR workforce. If you measure success by results, this was an outsourcing success.

Mac Curtis
President, Pearson Government Solutions
Arlington, Va.

I will forward your article to others so they can have a better understanding of what the TSA required and what was actually accomplished.

Roseann Caballero
Temple City, Calif.

Steven Kelman's thoughtful article "The Right Pay" (Viewpoint, May) laid out some of the challenges in linking federal employees' pay to performance. It is imperative that we rise to the overall challenge while using appropriate care in the design and implementation of a more modern performance-based pay system for federal employees. Doing so will be essential if we are to maximize performance and assure the accountability of the federal government to the American people.

All too often, we find that agencies' performance management systems are based on episodic and paper-intensive exercises that are not linked to the organization's strategic plan and have only a modest impact on the pay, utilization, development and promotion potential of federal workers. Leading organizations, on the other hand, use their performance management systems to accelerate change, achieve desired organizational results, and facilitate two-way communication throughout the year, so that discussions about individual and organizational performance are integrated and ongoing. In the near future, GAO will release a report it prepared at the request of Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va. The report illustrates specific practices that leading public sector organizations in the United States and abroad have used in their performance management systems to clearly link individual performance to organizational success.

We need to fundamentally rethink our approach to federal pay and develop an approach that places a greater emphasis on a person's knowledge, skills, position and performance rather than the passage of time, the rate of inflation and their location. Office of Personnel Management Director Kay Coles James' April 2002 white paper on modernizing federal pay amply demonstrated that the current federal pay system was designed for the heavily clerical, low-graded workforce of the 1950s rather than today's knowledge-based government. Similarly, the National Commission on the Public Service, chaired by Paul Volcker, observed that agencies need greater freedom to connect pay both to the job market and to performance. In short, as the nature of the federal workforce has changed, so too must our pay system if we are to effectively compete for top talent and create incentives for both individual and institutional success.

Under the current system, the overwhelming majority of each year's pay increase is largely unrelated to an employee's knowledge, skills, position or performance. In fact, more than 80 percent of the cost associated with raises is tied to longevity and the annual pay increase. In addition, current pay gaps vary by the nature of the person's position, yet the current method for addressing gaps assumes that they are the same throughout government. We must move beyond this outdated, "one size fits all approach" to paying federal employees.

The time has come to seriously explore more market- and performance-based approaches to federal pay. As part of this exploration, we need to continue to give agencies the flexibility to pilot alternative approaches to setting pay and linking it to performance. Many in public service are motivated by the mission of their agencies and their desire to make a difference, but they need to be compensated fairly. While additional use of team-based rewards may be appropriate in the public sector, modern merit principles and basic fairness would seem to require a more considered and performance-based approach to determining an individual employee's pay.

As with all pay-for-performance efforts, appropriate safeguards and accountability procedures would be needed to ensure fairness, and prevent politicization and abuse. Such safeguards and accountability would ensure that an agency's career leadership and managers have significant roles in performance-related pay decisions and that employees have central roles in the design and implementation of the system to build their sense of ownership. The bottom line is that in order to get any additional performance-based pay flexibility, agencies should have to demonstrate that they have the modern, effective, credible and validated performance management systems in place that are capable of supporting such decisions. Unfortunately, most federal agencies are a long way from meeting this test.

Over the past two years, GAO has designed and implemented a new competency and results-based performance management and compensation system for our audit, analyst and investigative staff. This system includes steps designed to address the important issues that Professor Kelman raised.

We recognize that our system is not perfect and never will be. In fact, we are constantly evaluating our efforts, seeking to learn from others, and making refinements. Our approach is not the only way, but it's one way that we are happy to share with others as we all seek to ensure that the federal government is able to attract and retain top talent to meet the many challenges of the 21st century.

David M. Walker
Comptroller General
General Accounting Office
Washington

The March Managing Technology column, "Wireless Insecurity," contained an incorrect reference to the Top Secret clearance of Northrop Grumman's secure wireless communications system. The system was certified by the National Security Agency.