Federal employees dispute 'slacker' image

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 (UPI) -- U.S. government workers are disputing a report that accuses them of skipping too much work.

The report claims that workers at 17 federal agencies and the U.S. Postal Service were absent without permission for 19.6 million hours between 2001 and 2007, The Washington Post reported Friday. The report's numbers show the average federal employee is AWOL from work for about 67 minutes a year, the Post article said.

There is "a sizable and growing number of federal employees who undermine the agencies they serve by failing to show up to work," said U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., the ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on federal financial management.

Others find the report misleading and little more than "a collection of numbers surrounded by innuendos and loose extrapolations," Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents more than 150,000 federal workers, told the Post.