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Washington, D.C. — Congress should support the implementation of sensible reforms to address mismanagement of workers’ compensation at Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the head of the union representing tens of thousands of CBP employees said in a letter Monday to members of a Senate committee.

“Compared to most other federal and private sector employment, there are serious risks of injury [at CBP],” wrote Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU). “Safety must and should be priority one… But reality is that every day, CBP employees will be injured on the job. This is why the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) is such an important protection for CBP employees.”

In the wake of an Office of the Inspector General (IG) for the Department of Homeland Security report on CBP’s mismanagement of the FECA program, Kelley sent a letter to Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ranking Member Susan Collins (R-Maine) and to the Subcommittee on Oversight and the Federal Workforce Chairman Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) and Ranking Member Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

The IG report found millions of taxpayer dollars are being misspent because of poor management of FECA claims at CBP. Additionally, the Inspector General made six recommendations, ranging from improving procedures ensuring chargeback billing to developing a single record system to conducting workload analysis.

In endorsing all of the IG’s recommendations, President Kelley wrote: “While NTEU has zero tolerance for employees who make fraudulent claims, much of the waste documented in the report is not beneficiary fraud but mismanagement, chargeback errors, understaffing and failure to collect from third parties.”

Additionally, Kelley said the IG’s recommendations are the right roadmap to eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in FECA rather than the government-wide benefit cuts proposed in the 21st Century Postal Service Act (S. 1789).

“The Postal Reform bill makes harsh and deep cuts to the benefits received by injured workers who are older or who have family obligations,” Kelley wrote.

NTEU is the nation’s largest independent union of federal workers, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments, including the entire 24,000-employee CBP bargaining unit.