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Washington, D.C.—As a result of the intervention of the National Treasury Employees (NTEU) on multiple fronts, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Social Security Administration (SSA) has withdrawn proposed fines of up to $3.5 million that it sought against four SSA employees, thereby completely exonerating them.

At NTEU’s insistence, the OIG also formally agreed not to take any further action against the employees--in any forum--based on any conduct related to the withdrawn charges.

“The OIG’s sudden reversal of course and its extraordinary agreement to forgo taking any action at all against these employees shows that there was nothing to the OIG’s charges from the beginning. It also provides the SSA employees with maximum protection from future baseless OIG investigations” into this issue, said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley.

NTEU served as counsel for two bargaining unit employees and a supervisor, who work in SSA’s Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR), in opposing hefty fines sought by the OIG. NTEU also worked closely as amicus curiae with the private counsel previously hired by another SSA employee against whom fines had been imposed.

The dispute arose when the OIG invoked a section of the Social Security Act designed to apply to individuals fraudulently seeking Social Security benefits. In the first-ever attempt to apply this law to SSA employees for conduct that occurred in the performance of their official duties, the OIG sought to assess civil penalties based on a disagreement over language that had appeared in decisions resolving disability claims. The dispute centered around an administrative law judge’s (ALJ) practice of citing the same written testimony of the same expert in over 700 decisions that he issued, all of which involved the same issues.

The OIG characterized the ALJ’s practice as misleading and illegal merely because the ALJ had failed to note that the expert’s testimony was not procured in connection with the individual cases in which it was cited. The ALJ had instructed the employees on how to draft the language of the decisions and had directed them to include the expert’s testimony

NTEU took aggressive action to protect the SSA employees against the OIG’s overreaching; in a letter to SSA Commissioner Jo Anne B. Barnhart, President Kelley pointed to the fact that SSA had determined that the expert testimony was correctly applied in each of the cases at issue and that the employees were acting at the direction of the ALJ who was issuing the benefits determinations.

In addition, NTEU represented the affected employees in administrative proceedings to challenge the penalties, filed a national grievance against SSA, took the matter to Capitol Hill and generated widespread publicity about what President Kelley described as “the OIG’s gross abuse of authority.” NTEU represents some 800 employees in the ODAR function, which previously was known as the Office of Hearings and Appeals.

“The OIG’s complete capitulation shows that, as NTEU has said all along, these employees did nothing wrong. It is outrageous that the inspector general used his considerable authority to put these employees in fear of losing, not only their jobs, but their life savings, when all they were doing was carrying out their job duties as directed by their supervisor,” Kelley said.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments.