Summary: As part of its downsizing efforts, the government has offered federal workers incentive payments, or buyouts, to encourage them to leave through voluntary separations. Unless a waiver is granted, buyout recipients generally must repay the buyout if they return to federal employment within five years of their separation. During the period GAO reviewed--January 1993 through June 1995--two different buyout rules were in effect at the Defense Department (DOD). DOD employees could receive buyouts, and they were not required to repay the buyouts if they returned to federal service, although DOD's policy was not to rehire its buyout recipients until one year after their separation. Beginning in March 1994, however, the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act mandated that all federal employees, including those at DOD, repay their buyouts if they returned to federal employment within five years of their separation. In October 1996, GAO reported on 23 cases of buyout recipients who appeared to have violated the act's repayment provision or DOD's reemployment policy or about whom GAO could not determine whether they had returned to federal employment because of inconsistent source data. (See GAO/GGD-97-7R.) This report discusses whether (1) the 23 buyout recipients returned to federal service and, if so, whether they repaid the buyout or met DOD's reemployment policy and (2) whether the agencies that were identified as employing the 23 buyout recipients had internal controls in place to help ensure that buyout recipients repaid buyouts when required to do so.
