WASHINGTON – Apparently it’s not easy to fire federal workers, even for obsessively surfing pornographic sites on the Internet.

But they can get counseling and other “progressive discipline.”
    
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, garnered considerable national publicity in April when he disclosed an inspector general’s investigation that implicated 33 Securities and Exchange Commission employees and contractors for seeking out pornographic websites over a five-year period and spending considerable taxpayer time doing it.
    
Since then, Grassley has followed up with the agency. He wanted to know why eight were allowed to resign rather than be fired, why a core group of 17 other tenured employees received only a “much lesser discipline” and “informal counseling” was the sole action against six.
    
Wants them fired
“The discipline given by the SEC doesn't match Chairman [Mary] Shapiro's agency-wide announcement that employees would be subject to termination if they were found viewing pornography on government time and on government property,” he said in a statement Wednesday. “For the SEC to be credible, it must put those words into action."
  
In recent letters to Grassley, SEC officials said that under federal law they are prohibited from firing workers “on the spot” for such activity. The agency also listed 18, not 17, employees who got lesser penalties ranging from reprimands to warning letters and counseling. Another of those involved, the agency said, has received “a proposal to terminate” and two have received “proposals” for 30-day suspensions without pay. But it added: “Their appeal rights are still ripe.”
   
The firing of federal employees is governed by complex notice and due process procedures, wrote Jeff Risinger, SEC personel director. Involuntary removal, he added, can be appealed to the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or arbitration.
 
High cost of firing federal employees
“Regardless of the forum chosen by the employee, agencies face high costs defending removal actions,” Risinger added.
   
Risinger said the Merit Systems Protection Board has identified a number of factors to consider in assessing the “reasonableness” of a penalty. They include the employee’s past disciplinary record, the employee’s work record and “the potential for the employee’s rehabilitation [and] the effectiveness of alternative sanctions to deter such conduct in the future.”
   
The Merit Systems Protection Board, the SEC official added, has long held that penalties “may be mitigated if there was no attempt to correct behavior with progressive discipline.”
   
The SEC letter to Grassley also lists the salaries of all those who either got a reprimand or were allowed to resign.
   
High salaries
Salaries of the eight who resigned ranged $69,388 to $169,903 and averaged $127,073. All but two had salaries of more than $100,000, but only one was a supervisor.
   
Salaries of the 18 who received lesser penalties ranged from $53,685 to $173,582 and averaged $131,931. All but two of the 18 had salaries of more than $100,000, but only three were supervisors.
 
Even before Grassley disclosed his information, there had been scattered news media account’s of the SEC’s porn problem, including some last year. That apparently didn’t discourage some. As recently March and February, the agency found instances of employees viewing “explicit material.”
   
The legislative option
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., earlier this month joined Grassley in inquiring about the lack of firings. She asked the agency if it faced “statutory or regulatory hurdles” in firing workers for such activities. “If you believe there are such barriers, I am prepared to help change the law to clear them,” the Missouri senator said.
 
McCaskill’s office said SEC officials have promised to meet with her soon.
 
Some SEC employees used agency laptops as well as other computers. One female worker with a laptop was found with 1,800 access denials to porn sites over a two-week period. She also had 600 pornographic images on the hard drive of the laptop.
 
Shortly before the July 4th recess, the House passed legislation explicitly banning government computers from being used to view or transmit pornography.  Civil liberties groups have already raised concerns about the constitutionality of the measure.