[House Hearing, 111 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
MANAGEMENT OF THE WORKLIFE SERVICES CENTER AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON HOUSE
ADMINISTRATION
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, JULY 29, 2009
__________
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COMMITTEE ON HOUSE ADMINISTRATION
ROBERT A. BRADY, Pennsylvania, Chairman
ZOE LOFGREN, California DANIEL E. LUNGREN, California
Vice-Chairwoman Ranking Minority Member
MICHAEL E. CAPUANO, Massachusetts KEVIN McCARTHY, California
CHARLES A. GONZALEZ, Texas GREGG HARPER, Mississippi
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California
ARTUR DAVIS, Alabama
Professional Staff
S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, Staff Director
Victor Arnold-Bik, Minority Staff Director
MANAGEMENT OF THE WORKLIFE SERVICES CENTER AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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WEDNESDAY, JULY 29, 2009
House of Representatives,
Committee on House Administration,
Washington, D.C.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 11:09 a.m., in Room
1310, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Robert A. Brady
[chairman of the committee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Brady, Capuano and Harper.
Staff Present: Jamie Fleet, Staff Director; Khalil Abboud,
Professional Staff; Matt Pinkus, Professional Staff/
Parliamentarian; Kyle Anderson, Press Director; Joe Wallace,
Legislative Clerk; Mary Sue Englund, Office Manager for
Representative Kevin McCarthy; and Caitlin Ryan, Minority
Professional Staff.
The Chairman. I would like to call the Committee on House
Administration to order and welcome our guests here and thank
you for being here. And we have Republican Members that are
jammed up in Judiciary Committee, but hopefully will be popping
in. And we are also joined by my dear colleague and friend Mike
Capuano, which makes this a quorum, so we can get started.
Good morning. We are convening here this morning to
continue our oversight of the management of the Library of
Congress. Today we will focus on the Worklife Services Center
of the Library of Congress. The Worklife Services Center, a
division of Human Resources Services, is responsible for many
critical aspects of employment administration of the Library of
Congress. The Center is divided into three departments, each
with many key functions: The Technical Services Team processes
all personnel requests, such as awards and salary increases;
the Employee Services Center, which counsels employees on
retirement issues and provides information on benefits.
Finally, Leave Administration processes all leave requests and
manages the leave bank at the Library of Congress.
On June 30, 2009, the inspector general of the Library of
Congress released a report assessing the efficiency and overall
quality of the Worklife Service Center. While the report was
generally favorable, the inspector general determined several
areas that required increased oversight in order to function
more efficiently and accurately. For example, management of the
leave bank was inaccurate, leading to incorrect leave balances.
Further, the investigation determined that the Human Resources
Services computer system is also at risk of fraud or abuse.
This hearing will satisfy House Rule 11. This rule was
amended by House Resolution 40, introduced by our colleague
John Tanner and passed in the House in January of this year.
The goal of H.Res. 40 is to ensure wise spending of tax dollars
through oversight hearings aimed at instances of waste, fraud
or abuse in government agencies.
It is our aim to eliminate the deficiencies in the Worklife
Services Center in order to provide more efficient and accurate
means of managing employees at the Library of Congress. This
hearing is merely the first step, and I look forward to the
testimony of the witnesses.
The Chairman. And I would like to recognize Mr. Capuano for
any opening statement that he may make.
That is scary. Mr. Capuano refuses to talk. Now, now, at
the moment.
[The information follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. We appreciate our panel, and we thank you for
coming over. Mr. Karl Schornagel is the inspector general of
the Library of Congress. His distinguished career has taken him
to the Commerce and Treasury Departments. And his more than 300
reports have saved the Federal Government nearly $400 million.
Dennis Hanratty is the Human Resources Director for the
Library of Congress, where he has worked for 26 years in
various capacities. His commitment to the Library and the
employees of the Library is without question, and he has earned
many awards and distinctions during his career.
We thank you gentlemen for appearing. We would ask you that
you limit your testimony to 5 minutes. I am not strict with
that but, we should have a relatively short hearing, we don't
mind if you go over that.
And I would now like to recognize Mr. Schornagel.
Mr. Schornagel. Thank you, Chairman Brady.
The Chairman. Would you pull that mic and push that button?
Mr. Schornagel. It is pushed. Can you hear me now?
The Chairman. A little closer.
Mr. Schornagel. Okay.
The Chairman. Okay. We got you.
STATEMENTS OF KARL SCHORNAGEL, INSPECTOR GENERAL, THE LIBRARY
OF CONGRESS; AND DENNIS HANRATTY, DIRECTOR FOR HUMAN RESOURCES,
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
STATEMENT OF KARL SCHORNAGEL
Mr. Schornagel. I thank you, Chairman Brady.
We audited WSC with the principal objectives of assessing
the efficiency and effectiveness of the WCS's activities and
services; determining whether there are adequate internal
controls to ensure timeliness, quality and an accuracy; and
evaluating the WSC's compliance with applicable laws and
regulations.
We determined that the WSC had made great strides in
improving customer service since we last reviewed it in 2003.
We found that personnel actions were being processed in a
timely manner. In addition, based on the results of the
customer service that we performed, we found that the Library
service and infrastructure units were generally satisfied with
the level of service provided by the WSC.
However, there is always a catch. Our audit also found that
the WSC lacked some important controls to ensure efficient and
effective operation in the Library's leave programs and to
detect and prevent the occurrence of fraud and errors.
I will highlight our three findings next. First, oversight
of leave administration. There was a high volume of unresolved
leave errors because error reports from the National Finance
Center, the organization that processes our payroll, were not
being utilized to make corrections. Timekeepers were not using
the reports to resolve leave discrepancies because they had not
been adequately trained on how to use these reports. If fully
utilized, the approximately $50,000-a-year cost of the reports
and unresolved errors could be substantially reduced. Over a 5-
year period, up to $250,000 of Library funds could be put to
better use by resolving the leave discrepancies in these error
reports.
Neither the WSC nor the Library's timekeepers were
effectively monitoring leave bank awards to ensure that
recipients receive full leave amounts that were granted; unused
awarded leave only for approved medical emergencies; and
returned any unused awarded leave to the leave bank. We found
28 percent of leave bank participant balances we tested were
inaccurate. We recommended that the WSC adopt a more active
oversight role for leave administration.
Our second finding area was controls for access to key
human resources IT systems. HRS had not restricted access to
its automated systems to the extent necessary or established
controls to effectively monitor the activities of employees
with wide access privileges. Specifically, master timekeepers
had unnecessary access rights to the Library's timekeeping
system to view and adjust leave balances of employees outside
of their supervision. Some employees had inappropriate access
rights to critical HRS IT systems because system
responsibilities had not been appropriately separated. And
activities of employees who had special access rights to the
Library's HR management system were unsupervised. As a result,
opportunities existed for fraud or abuse to occur. Due to these
missing controls, however, we were unable to test for fraud
because there was not an audit trail of the transactions that
had been processed.
We recommended that HRS implement safeguards to restrict
the access rights of legitimate users to the specific systems
and files the users need to perform their work.
The third area is performance standards for the Worklife
Services employees. We found that the WSC had not developed
adequate performance metrics to objectively and adequately
evaluate the performance of its staff. The standards that were
used were broad and vague and did not clearly define the
quality or quantity of work expected from the WSC's employees.
Consequently, the performance evaluations were highly
subjective, and it was difficult for HRS supervisors to hold
employees accountable for their work.
We recommended that the WSC develop more objective and
measurable requirements for its employees' performance
standards.
The Library's Director For Human Resources concurred with
our recommendations and has also been very responsive in
implementing corrective actions. I commend the Director not
only for his cooperation during this audit, but also for the
many improvements he has fostered in the Library's human
resources operation since the beginning of his tenure in 2005.
Our full report is available on our Web site, on our public
Web site, as stated in the last paragraph of my written
testimony. Thank you.
The Chairman. I thank you.
[The statement of Mr. Schornagel follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. And I would like to welcome Mr. Harper and
ask him if there is any statement that he would like to make.
Mr. Harper. Thank you, Mr. Brady, and I certainly
appreciate that, and I appreciate you calling this hearing. I
would ask for unanimous consent that an opening statement be
entered into the record today.
The Chairman. Without objection.
Mr. Harper. I would also like to say I will probably have
to leave to go back to the Judiciary Committee markup.
The Chairman. We understand. We stated that before you got
here. We know you are in a pretty important hearing over there.
Mr. Hanratty.
STATEMENT OF DENNIS HANRATTY
Mr. Hanratty. Yes, Chairman Brady, Ranking Member Lungren
and members of the committee. Thank you for this opportunity to
discuss the management of the Worklife Services Center at the
Library of Congress. I am Dennis Hanratty, Director for Human
Resources at the Library of Congress. It is a position I have
held since August of 2005.
The Library's Worklife Services Center, created in 2004 as
a part of Human Resources Services, has dedicated staff who
daily meet the human resources needs of the Library's employees
and service units. The Center was created largely in response
to a series of inspector general reviews finding that the
Library needed to, first of all, strengthen its internal
controls related to processing and approving certain personnel
actions; and, two, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of
our services to the Library's workforce.
The Center provides one-stop shopping for Library employees
in areas such as pay and leave administration, personnel
benefits, employee assistance services, personnel records and
retirement counseling. We continually work to improve our
service in these particular areas. In fact, over the last 5
years, Mr. Chairman, we have enhanced virtually every Center
activity that serves the employees of the Library of Congress
actually from before the first day that a new Library employee
reports to duty, through new-employee orientation, through
retirement counseling and out-processing.
This year's audit of the Library's Worklife Services Center
shows, in my opinion, the positive results that we sought when
we established the Center in 2004. Among other findings, the
audit revealed that the average processing time for personnel
actions was 7 days, and that is a 74 percent improvement over
the level that the inspector general found in his 2003 audit.
As part of this year's audit, the inspector general also
surveyed the Library's service units regarding the Center's
performance, and they found broad satisfaction, with most
answers in the 85 to 90 percent satisfaction level. Service
unit staff reported to the inspector general that the Center
staff are approachable, they are friendly and professional,
they are knowledgeable of procedures and regulations, they are
able to respond and answer questions, and they are willing to
help to direct a question to the appropriate level if they
don't know the answer.
These results conform to the broader 2008 Library employee
survey, which we conducted in the fall of 2008, which revealed
staff satisfaction with both our worklife programs and our
benefits options. Most of the levels in the Library-wide
employee survey with respect to worklife programs and benefit
options exceeded the government average.
As with any organization, there are always opportunities to
strengthen and improve our services, and that is the spirit in
which we viewed the inspector general's audit. We welcomed that
audit, we concurred with the findings, and we appreciated his
recommendations.
In response to the specific concerns that the inspector
general raised last month, we have already enacted four
specific steps. First of all, we have issued comprehensive
procedures on the management of the Library's Voluntary Leave
Bank Program.
Second, we have promulgated a directive governing the
security of personally identifiable information. This is an
issue we have been working on very closely with the Library's
Office of General Counsel, with the Library's Information
Technology Services and the service units in general. We take
the issue of protecting employee personal data very seriously.
The third thing we have already done is to separate-- based
on the recommendation of the inspector general, duties in our
human resources systems.
And finally, we have already developed for fiscal year 2010
to put into effect on October 1 performance standards for the
Center staff that contains standards of timeliness, accuracy
and quality.
Now, in addition to the four things we have already done,
we reported to the inspector general that there were a series
of other things that we would enact, and we will do each of
these and have each of these in place by September 30th. First,
we will train the service unit timekeepers in procedures for
the Voluntary Leave Bank Program that I mentioned before.
Second, we will conduct periodic reviews of our time and
attendance and payroll systems to ensure that leave bank
donations are being appropriately recorded, and if there are
leave bank donations to be returned back to the bank, that they
are done in a timely fashion.
The third thing that we are going to be doing between now
and September 30th is to evaluate the master timekeepers' roles
and responsibilities, and more clearly define their role. The
inspector general had recommended that we consider using an
organizational tree feature that is in our time and attendance
system, and we have already begun consultations with our
information technology experts to see if that can be done.
The final thing that we will do between now and September
30th is to process all appropriate personnel actions through
the EmpowHR work-in-progress system and develop procedures for
any actions that we believe cannot appropriately be processed
through that system.
Now, finally, in my written testimony I also outlined some
other significant improvements that we have made, including
enhancing an error-free interface with our payroll provider,
the National Finance Center; establishing secure digital
versions of employee personnel files; and providing one-stop,
on-site and off-site employee assistance services and
retirement counseling.
And I would be happy to answer any questions that the
committee members my have.
The Chairman. I thank the gentleman.
[The statement of Mr. Hanratty follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Mr. Schornagel, what would be the cost, both
in dollars and cents and manpower, to implement your
recommendations?
Mr. Schornagel. It would be very minimal, and it would be
offset by an extremely large margin by the savings that could
be implemented by not receiving the big error reports. The
error reports are optional for the Library to receive, and if
we could cut down on the errors, those reports would be very,
very minimal, and the cost would be almost nothing.
So the only thing we are really talking about here is a
little bit more time in supervision from the managers and some
training for the employees to process these errors and resolve
these erroneous transactions that sometimes stay on the books
for quite some time.
The Chairman. So we might even save some money.
Mr. Schornagel. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
The Chairman. Mr. Hanratty, if an employee is found to act
fraudulently with respect to documenting their annual leave,
what is the punishment? What happens to someone for falsifying
annual leave?
Mr. Hanratty. If an individual falsifies annual leave, he
or she could be subject to both administrative penalties at the
Library, which could result up to dismissal from the agency. We
would also bring those concerns to the inspector general's
attention, and he and his staff would make a determination
whether to refer those issues further for possible criminal
action.
The Chairman. Is there a first time, second time?
Mr. Hanratty. Well, a lot depends on the course of action.
Yes, I think we probably look at the degree of severity. There
are a series of standards that we always use in the course of
determining or recommending to a manager the appropriate level
of discipline. And so it may depend on the severity of the
action; it may depend on whether this is a first-time offense.
There is a series of categories we would look at, and then we
would make that recommendation.
The Chairman. I appreciate that.
Mr. Harper, do you have any questions?
Mr. Harper. Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
First of all, I would like to say how important the Library
of Congress is to me personally and to this country. And we do
appreciate the role that you have to fill and continue to do
that.
Mr. Hanratty, I would ask you as we look through this, the
IG report mentioned the leave administration appeared to be one
of the largest areas of concern, and I know that looking at 57
employee accounts that were reviewed, 32 had errors. To what do
you attribute those errors, and how do you plan to improve on
that or to prevent those in the future?
Mr. Hanratty. Well, I basically attribute that, Mr. Harper,
to the fact that we were so focused on getting the job done and
making sure that the appropriate transactions were recorded in
the leave systems that that was our principal attention, as
opposed to focusing on whether the leave donations that had
been given to an employee were returned back to the bank if, in
fact, the individual did not need the full spectrum of that
award to address the medical deficiency.
We have already identified and put into place a procedure,
that we have drafted since the inspector general's report,
which makes it very clear as to what needs to happen to not
only record the initial contribution for the voluntary leave
bank contribution, but also to monitor the action subsequent to
that, to make sure that, in fact, it is used for the
appropriate purpose. And if there is any leave that is left
over, we go ahead and recoup that.
Mr. Harper. Have you shared that new plan with Mr.
Schornagel?
Mr. Hanratty. I have not, but I would be happy to, yes.
Mr. Harper. All right.
Mr. Hanratty. I would like to mention, though, that
although clearly the inspector general's report suggested that
we needed to put some additional controls on the back end of
the leave bank program, which we have done, and which we will
train service unit personnel between now and September 30th, we
do have a number of controls that have been in place for a long
time on the front end of the process. That is, if we receive,
for example, a leave bank request, an application from an
employee, we will first check the database to make sure that
this employee's leave balance has been exhausted; that is, the
employee has no annual leave, has no compensatory time, has no
credit hours and so forth, so that the individual does, in
fact, face a possible financial hardship of leave without pay
if a leave bank application is not approved.
Mr. Harper. Thank you.
Mr. Hanratty. The second thing we would do then is we would
require that individual to provide medical documentation
attesting to the medical incapacitation that is contained in
the application. We provide that documentation then to our
Health Services Office, which reviews it and makes a
determination that, in fact, it is appropriate. And so only
until we take all of those steps would we, in fact, approve an
action.
Mr. Harper. Yes. Thank you very much, Mr. Hanratty.
Mr. Schornagel, if I may ask how you would you compare the
Library's Worklife Services Center with other similar Federal
agencies in terms of how efficient it is, effectiveness, the
procedures, the accuracy of their information? Would you rate
the Library as above or below average? How would you categorize
that?
Mr. Schornagel. We did not do any formal benchmarking in
this audit, but from my personal experience of 30 years in the
Federal Government, I think right now that we are in good
shape, and probably that the Library's human resources program,
or at least the portion that we looked at recently, is probably
certainly above average.
Mr. Harper. Thank you very much. I yield back the balance
of my time.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Harper.
Mr. Capuano.
Mr. Capuano. Mr. Chairman, I just heard you say--I just
want to make sure I hear it right--that you are reasonably
satisfied with the progress that has been made?
Mr. Schornagel. Yes. I think the findings and the
recommendations that we made back in 2003, there were some
repeated during this audit; for example, the performance plans
and the leave errors. However, I think Dennis Hanratty has made
significant progress, and that is certainly borne out in the
responses that we received from the customer survey that we
did. In 2003, the customer survey responses were not near as
good as they are today. And also back in 2003, we found, for
example, only 16 percent of the personnel actions processed
were timely, and that is dramatically improved today.
Mr. Capuano. So they are making progress.
Mr. Schornagel. They are making good progress.
Mr. Capuano. They are making progress, and you are happy,
then I am happy.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Capuano.
Thank you, both of you, for coming today. As stated
earlier, the Library of Congress is a wealth of information for
all of us. When I first got here, it was whatever you want to
know, just call over there. If they don't know it, nobody knows
it. If they don't know it, they will find it out. And we do
utilize you tremendously. So again, thank you for being here,
and thank you for your participation, and thank you for the
great job that you do. We appreciate it.
The hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:35 a.m., the committee was adjourned.]