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Washington, D.C.—Figures provided to a federal panel by Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) management show clearly that, despite the intent of Congress, the agency’s unilaterally-implemented pay parity plan does not spend all the money set aside for that purpose, the leader of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said today.

“By its own figures, the agency is showing that it is flouting the clear intent of Congress that SEC employees enjoy pay parity with other federal financial regulatory agencies,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley. “More importantly,” she said, “this failure occurs as the American people look increasingly to the SEC for protection from fraud and financial abuse.”

NTEU and the SEC are in a prolonged dispute over employee pay parity, and the matter was considered in an informal conference earlier this week with Mark Carter, a member of the Federal Service Impasses Panel (FSIP), and FSIP Executive Director Joseph Shimansky.

No agreement was reached at the conference, so Carter instructed both NTEU and the SEC to submit their “best and final offers” by Sept. 12, and statements in support of those positions by Sept. 19. After that, he will submit his recommendation to the full FSIP for a binding decision and order.

President Kelley was critical of the agency’s accounting approach to the pay dispute, noting that SEC officials had testified before Congress that a fully comparable pay system would cost at least $100 million.

“Based on the data and presentation submitted to NTEU and the Panel representatives during the informal conference,” Kelley said, “it is clear that the annual cost of the agency pay plan is only $45 million.”

Further, she said, of the $24.8 million in the agency’s 2002 budget that has been made available to fund the pay plan the SEC unilaterally adopted in May, the agency spends only $16.5 million during fiscal 2002.

The union leader noted that “the SEC rejected every NTEU proposal to ensure that bargaining unit employees receive their proportional share of the remaining $8 million, even those (proposals) that were explicitly conditioned on the availability of such funds.”

President Kelley said all of this evidence goes “directly to the heart of the SEC position—which is that it alone has the right to determine who gets what and when. This agency has little regard for its employees, and no regard for the clear will of Congress.”

Congress enacted legislation—in an effort spearheaded by NTEU—to provide pay parity for SEC employees to help address severe recruitment and retention problems in this key financial regulatory agency. Since then, the SEC has been unwilling to reach agreement with NTEU on a pay parity plan to accomplish that end.

The plan the agency is seeking to implement benefits managers disproportionately at the expense of bargaining unit employees, President Kelley said.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 26 agencies and departments, including about 2,000 in a nationwide SEC bargaining unit.