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Washington, D.C.—The leader of the union representing some 2,000 employees of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) today criticized as failing to meet the intent of Congress and imposing an unfair burden on employees the agency’s “final offer” on pay parity as submitted to a federal panel for consideration.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said the agency’s proposal would leave the pay of SEC employees at least six percent—and perhaps more—behind the pay of other federal financial regulatory agencies.

“That is hardly the result for SEC employees envisioned by Congress when it approved pay parity legislation last year,” President Kelley said. “The agency’s proposal does not spend even what it has on hand for pay parity,” she added, noting that its own figures show the agency would spend only $16.5 million of the $25 million available this fiscal year.

Moreover, Kelley said, SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt has asked Congress for $76 million to fund pay parity in fiscal 2003, but has put the annual cost in that fiscal year at $45 million.

NTEU and the SEC have been engaged in a protracted dispute over pay parity for agency employees, and the SEC unilaterally adopted a new pay system effective in mid-May.

The matter has now gone to the Federal Service Impasses Panel (FSIP), an arm of the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA). An FSIP panel member ordered the parties to submit their final offers last week, after which he will make his recommendation to the full panel.

President Kelley said the SEC offer “does nothing to alleviate the pressing recruitment and retention problems facing this vital agency, which were, in large part, the impetus for congressional approval of pay parity legislation.” She called that “especially discouraging in light of the justifiable concerns among the American people, and the demands for a stronger SEC, raised by the questionable behavior of some high-profile corporations and business executives.”

The NTEU leader characterized the SEC proposal as “unresponsive to the agency’s real needs and overly complicated,” calling it one that gives management “extraordinary rights” not only to deny employees pay raises, but to actually cut their pay. As one example, she cited an agency proposal that would have employees spending time “building their performance portfolios rather than doing the work of government” in an attempt to qualify for future pay raises. “This is really only a thinly veiled attempt to shift the burden of having to write appraisals from managers to employees,” Kelley said.

Moreover, she noted, under the agency’s proposal, not only would the number of managers who would have to be involved in any given pay raise decision double, managers in any one of three levels above an employee could veto that employee’s pay raise. “Any significant long-term change” in SEC employees’ compensation “should be worked out with employees through bargaining,” President Kelley said, and “not through the unilateral adoption of a new, more complicated pay scheme that unfairly rewards managers at the expense of other employees.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 26 agencies and departments.