WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- More than 30,000 Internal Revenue Service employees will share in a $5 million back pay settlement, the National Treasury Employees Union said Thursday.
The $5 million settlement implements the decision of an arbitrator in December, the union said. The arbitrator who ruled in favor of NTEU's grievance alleging the agency had underpaid awards program recipients, mainly because it had underfunded the program by wrongly basing its awards calculations on outdated employee salary figures.
Payments to impacted employees will be made within the next 60 days, the union said.
NTEU president Colleen Kelley called the settlement "a major victory" not only for underpaid 2003 awards recipients, but for future IRS performance award recipients.
The parties also agreed that any future supplemental awards payments -- including for such reasons as underfunding the awards pool -- will be paid from fiscal year funds in which the award was paid, not by reducing awards funding levels in subsequent years.
