REWARDING employees for saving money!
The Federal Government does not provide equitable rewards for innovative thinking. In terms of rewarding people, most reward programs are designed to make the incentive for saving the government money very small. Take for instance of the change that one IRS employee made to make dependents SSNs required on the forms. After not acting on the suggestion as an idea to increase revenue, the department decided to do so ...more »
The Federal Government does not provide equitable rewards for innovative thinking. In terms of rewarding people, most reward programs are designed to make the incentive for saving the government money very small. Take for instance of the change that one IRS employee made to make dependents SSNs required on the forms. After not acting on the suggestion as an idea to increase revenue, the department decided to do so years later. By the time the reward was given to the suggestor, the US had actually increased revenues by $14 Billion Dollars. However, the suggestor was still given the same paltry reward for his idea, limited by regulation to be no more than $25,000. However, in the world of whistle blowing (Qui Tam lawsuits), the relator can be rewarded a great deal larger sum of money, usually an amount that is about 15% of the total recovery or savings to the government. If that were the case, this suggestor would have been able to make his suggestion and receive over $2 Billion Dollars. That is a real incentive for the most innovative thinkers not only to make the best suggestions; it would also create more suggestions and would ultimately pay for itself in short order. The Federal Government could become very lean and very efficient by incentivizing those employees that are very keen to cut waste, and by attracting the type employees who can do the same in government as industry. By creating one large rewards program that covered the entire federal government instead of just each branch or agency, the oversight provided by each agency seeing the suggestions made by employees/service members across the entire government the backlog/logjam that exists in each suggestion program could be broken. For instance, I currently have several ideas that are in the Army's suggestion program that have been sitting in review for over 2 years. By the time they are decided upon they will either be overcome by events or somehow already initiated into another idea, but that would be late or possibly ineffective. Creating one "super Rewards" program across the Federal Government would reduce or eliminate all that Agency issues that some much plague the way the Federal Government does business. The Government has created so much redundancy and inefficiency the only way to eliminate it removes all the shadows each Agency casts over the wastefulness. One rewards programs with real rewards will incentivize or government to be the efficient buying machine, taxing machine and governing machine, etc., it was meant to be.
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