FederalDaily - August 17, 2005
IRS Cuts Jobs
Last week the IRS announced that its employees have put together a winning
bid in their efforts to retain the work of the submission processing files
function, but—according to the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU)—at
a significant cost. The in-house group of employees, known as the Most Efficient
Organization (MEO), won the work by giving up valuable benefits, an NTEU statement
said. Under the new structure, the work will now be performed by hundreds of “intermittent” employees,
as opposed to full-time, part-time or seasonal employees. In the federal government,
intermittent employees have no fixed work schedule and generally are not eligible
for sick or annual leave, health or life insurance benefits, or Thrift Savings
Plan participation, NTEU said. Currently the work is performed by 843 employees
(82 are intermittent employees). The workforce will be reduced to 677 employees
and only 98 of those positions will be permanent.
:: Back to Top ::
NASA Selects Contractor for Employee Training
NASA has selected ASRC Management Services, Inc., of Greenbelt, Md., to provide
career training and development services for agency engineers and program and
project managers through classroom and Internet training. The Integrated Learning
and Development program will support individual project managers, project teams
and NASA projects and programs at every level of the agency, according to an
agency statement. Training will cover such topics as risk management, cost
containment and schedule maintenance. There will be various training locations
throughout the United States at or near NASA field centers. The maximum value
of the contract is $49 million for the base year plus four one-year options.
Supporting ASRC in this effort will be DTI Associates, Inc., of Arlington,
Va.
:: Back to Top ::
DoD Struggles with Delivering Supplies
Problems in the Department of Defense’s (DoD) supply distribution system—which
date back to the Persian Gulf War—have impeded DoD’s ability to
provide effective and timely logistics support to war fighters, a new Government
Accountability Office (GAO) report says. Although DoD has made progress in
addressing supply distribution problems, there are still problems in defining
who has accountability and authority for making such improvements. But GAO
said there has been some headway. Two promising initiatives that have been
implemented are, first, the establishment of a deployment and distribution
operations center in Kuwait to coordinate the arrival of supplies and, second,
the consolidation of air shipments to Iraq that do not require sorting and
repacking when they arrive in theater. To read the full report, go to www.gao.gov/new.items/d05775.pdf.
:: Back to Top ::
Senator Decries Federal IT Security
Last week Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Ranking
Member Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said federal agencies are failing to fulfill
their responsibilities for implementing effective information security policies
and practices and must do a better job of safeguarding their computer resources.
Lieberman pointed to a July report by the Government Accountability Office,
which found that weaknesses exist in almost all areas of information security
controls at 24 major agencies. The study was a requirement under the Federal
Information Security Management Act enacted in 2002. “Information security
is critical to carrying out all government functions and to preventing the
inappropriate disclosure of sensitive individual and national security information,” Lieberman
said.
:: Back to Top ::
|
