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A special premium pay cap authority in section 1701 (below in part) of the “Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act” (Public Law 117-43, September 30, 2021) waives the normal premium pay caps during calendar year 2021 for certain exempted premium payments received by eligible employees.
SEC. 1701. (a)(1) If services performed by the designated employees under paragraph (2) of this subsection at the Department of the Interior or the Department of Agriculture during 2021 are determined by the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture, as applicable, to be primarily related to emergency wildland fire suppression activities, any premium pay for such services shall be disregarded in calculating the aggregate of such employee’s basic pay and premium pay for purposes of a limitation under section 5547(a) of title 5, United States Code, or under any other provision of law, whether such employee’s pay is paid on a biweekly or calendar year basis. Any services during 2021 that generate payments payable in 2022 shall be disregarded in applying this subsection.
Unfortunately, there is no systematic way for us to identify impacted employees. As a result, it is necessary for the DOI Bureaus to identify employees who require us to perform audits where we will manually recalculate and process any applicable payments to those employees who had reduced pay.
On January 28, 2022, Jeffery Rupert, Director, Office of Wildland Fire (OWF), DOI, Office of the Secretary, issued a memorandum with the subject “Waiver of the Premium Pay Limitation for Emergency Wildland Fire Suppression Activities". The memorandum stated that the offices of Human Capital and OWF would be coordinating with us to facilitate the payment for impacted employees by Bureau.
The DOI Bureaus need to complete the spreadsheet attached to the OWF memo with the identified impacted employees and email it to Erin Horsburgh, OWF, Deputy Director, at Erin_Horsburgh@ios.doi.gov. If there are any questions related to the spreadsheet, please contact Ms. Erin Horshburgh at 208-334-1550 or by email at Erin_Horsburgh@ios.doi.gov.
We are requesting the spreadsheet be submitted to Ms. Horshburgh no later than March 18, 2022. This is to ensure the spreadsheets can then be provided by Ms. Horshburgh to the Payroll Operations Branch (POB) no later than March 25, 2022.
Within one week of confirmed receipt of the spreadsheets, the POB will notify Ms. Horshburgh with the pay period (PP) each audit will completed, and payment will be issued. It is our expectation that the information will be shared with the impacted employees. As a result, employees should not contact the Customer Support Center unless they have not received their payment within the PP communicated by POB.
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