FederalDaily - March 9, 2006

Army Reservists Missing Training to be Discharged

Members of the Army National Guard and reserves must participate in mandatory weekend training sessions or face being discharged under new streamlined procedures unveiled on Feb. 28. Under previous regulations, non-participating soldiers received four certified warning letters. Now non-participants have 30 days to respond to a single notification letter. Those that do not respond face a discharge from service, loss of benefits and reimbursement of unearned incentives. Col. Elizabeth F. Wilson, deputy director of Military Personnel Management, said, “We are transforming the Army, while serving a nation at war, and this realignment is an integral part of that transformation.” The abbreviated notification procedures will be phased in over the next year. Currently, 15,000 reserve troops are not participating in mandatory training, officials said.

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Union Gives DoD No Confidence Vote

Department of Defense (DoD) Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went back on public promises to protect collective bargaining and provide employee safeguards in devising the National Security Personnel System (NSPS), the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) said on Tuesday in giving Rumsfeld a vote of no confidence. “Secretary Rumsfeld has proven that what he says and what he does are very different,” AFGE said in the resolution. The vote comes just over a week after a U.S. District Court ruling blocking the implementation of portions of NSPS. The vote and the resolution received support from the AFL-CIO and the United DoD Workers Coalition.

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NTEU Holds Protest of Tax Collection Outsourcing

An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plan to outsource tax collection responsibilities would waste taxpayer dollars and make private information vulnerable, according to a press release by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) issued last week. NTEU organized a protest outside of the IRS headquarters on March 1, 2006, to coincide with the signing of the first outsourcing contracts. “The IRS and the government are doing nothing to spread the word about what is coming down the road,” said NTEU President Colleen Kelley. Kelley argued that private tax collectors could receive $25 per $100 collected, compared with $0.53 when using IRS employees. NTEU is supporting H.R. 1621—presented by Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Conn. and Chris Van Hollen D-Md.—that would repeal the IRS authority to hire private tax collectors.

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