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Washington, D.C.—The first anniversary of the financial collapse of Enron Corporation underscores the critical importance to the nation of a fully funded Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), staffed by employees who are both respected and paid competitive salaries, the head of the union representing some 2,000 SEC employees today.

“The devastation brought to the lives of Enron employees, shareholders and so many others by the collapse of that public company was a wake-up call for greater financial regulatory oversight,” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).

Still, she said, SEC employees have not yet achieved pay parity with other federal financial regulatory bodies, despite legislation secured earlier this year largely as a result of NTEU’s efforts that was designed to produce pay parity and address the agency’s recruitment and retention problems.

For one thing, she noted, the administration failed to adequately fund pay parity in its budget proposal, and the agency, in turn, both allocated more of the available funds to raises for managers and provided them with six percent larger raises than for employees.

“The SEC is faced with the largest caseload in its 70-year history,” Kelley said, including not just the aftermath of the Enron debacle, but a number of other major bankruptcies as well. “There is simply no way the

SEC can meet its responsibilities in the manner the public expects and needs,” the NTEU leader, “if the agency and the administration continue to follow their present course.”

President Kelley reiterated NTEU’s intention to return to the bargaining table with the SEC over pay once the agency’s 2003 appropriations bill is approved. “That will provide us with the opportunity to implement congressional intent that SEC employees be paid on a par with other federal financial regulatory bodies,” she said.

Last month, the Federal Service Impasses Panel (FSIP) issued a decision in the NTEU-SEC pay parity dispute permitting the resumption of negotiations even as it allowed the SEC to implement a pay plan that largely ignores the intent of Congress and the recruitment and retention problems of the agency. Kelley was sharply critical of that decision, describing it as “going against legitimate employee interests” on virtually every issue.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing more than 150,000 employees in 27 agencies and departments.