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Washington, D.C.—The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) has won a significant arbitration victory opening the way for potentially hundreds of NTEU-represented Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees to receive awards under the union-negotiated Employee Suggestion Program (ESP) at the agency. Such awards can range up to 25 percent of first-year savings. Under the decision, employees who have submitted suggestions through alternative processes will now be eligible for awards.

In the decision, the arbitrator faulted the IRS for failing to take appropriate action to “link” the negotiated employee suggestion program with other programs and avenues, some of them very informal, initiated by various IRS business units to elicit ideas and suggestions from employees. Such a linkage would have ensured that employee ideas were considered for awards under provisions of the ESP, whether they were submitted to management through the ESP or in any other manner.

Under the NTEU-IRS collective bargaining agreement, ESP is the only vehicle through which employees can obtain monetary awards for their suggestions adopted by management. Suggestions must be above and beyond the employee’s normal job responsibilities and range from cost-saving measures to ways to close the tax gap.

“Frontline employees are experts in how an agency operates and often have excellent ideas on improving those operations. The IRS encouraged those ideas through a variety of channels rather than encouraging employees to submit suggestions through the negotiated program so that they could be properly rewarded,” said NTEU National President Colleen M. Kelley. “This decision fixes that problem and the resulting focus on the suggestion program should generate even more ideas that will only benefit employees, the IRS and America’s taxpayers.”

The arbitrator decided that an appropriate remedy to the problem would be to allow all employees who made suggestions through a non-ESP program between May 26, 2006, and the present to resubmit those ideas through the formal suggestion program. This will allow them to be eligible for cash awards for suggestions that have been implemented and resulted in savings for the agency. Employees will have six months to resubmit their ideas.

“With the ESP, the union negotiated a formalized process for providing employees with a stake in improving their workplace, and that process must be followed,” Kelley said.

In some instances, even when the suggestion has gone through the ESP, NTEU has successfully challenged the amount of the award received by an employee by showing that the agency reaped greater savings than it claimed.

The decision also noted that linkages between the informal and formal processes must be established and the arbitrator pointed to NTEU’s belief that there should be automatic or near-automatic ‘cross-filing’ of all suggestions through whatever program or mechanism with the ESP.

The arbitration decision cites a provision in the NTEU-IRS agreement establishing the ESP as saying “employees’ ideas solicited through management channels other than the suggestion program will be linked to the suggestion program to assure that the (IRS) meets its obligation to employees.

“This provision,” the decision continues, “appears to require precisely what the union contends the agency failed to do—to ‘link’ to the ESP employee suggestions generated by ‘parallel programs’ so that employees might receive suggestion awards for those ideas, if adopted.”

NTEU has demonstrated, she said, that IRS management “repeatedly promulgated a variety of independent programs and campaigns soliciting employee ideas and suggestions intended to achieve improvements and efficiencies in a wide range of agency operations without reminding employees that only ideas submitted through the ESP are eligible for suggestion awards.” That, she said, violated the parties’ contract.