The FDA Mismanages Employee Pay And Benefits // Pharmalot

The FDA Mismanages Employee Pay And Benefits // Pharmalot: "The FDA Mismanages Employee Pay And Benefits
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By Ed Silverman // November 5th, 2008 // 10:06 am

The FDA may be on a hiring spree and snared 1,300 new faces, but consider the working environment - a suffocating bureaucracy, ever-changing leadership, compensation that lags industry pay and, as it turns out, woeful record-keeping that shortchanges employees.

In a letter to FDA commish Andy von Eschenbach, Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the US Senate Finance Committee, writes that “high-level FDA officials and others have complained” about paycheck errors that resulted in “legal fees and sloppy record keeping.” The errors have “shaken confidence” in the FDA’s personnel management.

“Based on the reports that have come to me, it looks like there is more than isolated incidents of mismanagement, and it could have significant repercussions for the quality workforce that the public deserves to have at the Food and Drug Administration,” he writes.

A few examples: an FDA employee went to the emergency room in the middle of the night with a sick child, but discovered the FDA had incorrectly fired him, which meant there were no health benefits. Two employees may have been mistakenly overpaid by several t"