Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed federal agencies' use of buyout authority, focusing on the: (1) number of employees who were eligible to take a buyout and the number of employees who took buyouts from January 1993 through June 30, 1995; (2) extent to which these buyouts recipients were subsequently reemployed as civil servants or government contractors; and (3) management controls that the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) use to prevent reemployment abuses. GAO noted that: (1) buyout eligibility was extended to non-Department of Defense (DOD) federal employees who had served under appointments without time limits, had 12 months of continuous service, were not reemployed annuitants, and were not eligible for disability retirement; (2) non-DOD buyout recipients who are rehired as federal contractors within 5 years of their separation dates must repay the full amount of their buyouts, unless the government waives the repayment requirement; (3) only 394 of the 87,743 federal employees who took buyouts between January 1993 and June 1995 were rehired as civil servants; (4) buyout recipients may work for service contractors without having to repay their buyouts; (5) federal agencies must perform cost comparisons before filling vacated positions with service contractor personnel; (6) while data on the reemployment of buyout recipients as federal contractors are very limited, evidence suggest that such reemployment is not extensive; and (7) DOT and NASA have management controls to prevent buyout recipients from abusing the reemployment provisions.
