Reply to Reasonable Accommodation Abuse?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just about EVERYONE can find a reason to work from home full time. And they will find it.

Pre-COVID I was a fed manager and I can attest that WFH is not sustainable long-term if there are major duties that absolutely must be done in-house, particularly for security reasons.

I had one employee who figured out a way to get a WFH based on RA 5 days a week. The reality is employee had purchased a country home 2 hours away from office and didn't want to commute anymore. Employee used a common health condition (I was told what it was) as the basis for RA and HR told us they must be accommodated. So be it.

Once this happened there were 3 more employees who used the same tactics to get WFH 5 days per week. It amounted to more than 50% of the team who could not do a majority of their critical/secure duties because they were at home.

Guess who wound up going to all the in-person required meetings, doing all the secure work, etc. Everyone else. There was no additional pay for these additional duties, however.

We had documented evidence that the WFH employees were NOT working, they were outside doing construction work on their country home, running an Ebay resale business out of their home, and doing the admin work for their spouse's business.

Went to HR and asked about getting job descriptions rewritten based on actual duties employees were performing and it would have reduced their grades substantially (Eg. GS-13s were ACTUALLY doing work at the GS-7 or 9 level.)  So HR didn't want to go down that rat hole.

Once we tried for several days to get ahold of the country bumpkin who refused to answer personal phone and wasn't responding to e-mails. Bumpkin was actually annoyed that we were reaching out  and considered it an "interruption" to the work they were doing around their country home.

Bottom line: HR didn't care and management didn't want to take it on because they feared accusations of discrimination.

What wound up happening is that these employees "worked" from home FOR YEARS because of RA and the American people paid their salaries for virtually nothing.

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Timecard fraud is one of the easier issues to document and punish and you don't need to go through your management structure or HR to report it. That doesn't seem like it's the complaint here. [/quote]

Reporting it is one thing, getting it to reach the stage of discipline is another. Timecard fraud must be done by agency IG. It's an uphill battle if IG goes to HR and are told employee has an RA and may have a discrimination case if confronted. IGs basically don't want to bother at that point.[/quote]

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