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Washington, D.C.—While seeking broad authority to make wholesale changes in pay and benefits for federal law enforcement officers, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has failed to address a basic unfairness of the present system: law enforcement officer status that has been long denied to a large bloc of federal employees who daily perform dangerous and difficult law enforcement work.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) expressed that view in the wake of an OPM report on the wide range of disparate retirement benefits; classification and basic pay; and premium pay among those in the federal law enforcement community.

Kelley will offer congressional testimony on these issues Tuesday morning at a hearing of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Civil Service and Agency Organizations.

The NTEU leader said the OPM proposal actually is a major step backward in that it would rely on untested and unproven pay-for-performance systems—in much the same manner as are being proposed for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Defense (DoD); would create a two-tier retirement system with unspecified benefits for some employees; and would effectively remove large numbers of employees from under coverage of the civil service laws contained in Title 5 of the U.S. Code.

“Implementing the ideas in the OPM report would hurt the very employees the administration admits are critical to the nation’s security, and there is no justification for doing that,” she said.

NTEU represents over 15,000 legacy U.S. Customs Service employees in DHS. Thousands of them are legacy Customs inspectors and canine enforcement officers for whom NTEU has been battling to obtain federal law enforcement officer status for some time.

NTEU’s long fight on this issue seeks, as well, to extend the law officer designation to thousands of Internal Revenue Service revenue officers whose jobs routinely subject them to dangerous situations, including contact with individuals such as organized tax protestors.

“It’s disappointing the OPM report sidesteps this issue of basic fairness affecting legacy Customs officers and IRS revenue officers, ” President Kelley said, noting that critical aspects of the day-to-day work of all these federal employees “clearly and significantly” involves law enforcement duties.

The lengthy report was produced by OPM in response to a congressional mandate last year. In essence, it seeks to consolidate within OPM—in consultation with affected agencies and the attorney general—the right to make sweeping changes in the pay, benefit and retirement systems affecting federal employees working in a wide range of law enforcement positions.

NTEU is the nation’s largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments.