A new audit from the Inspector General for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has found that a massive number of its employees blatantly violated their organizations telework agreement.
According to a Daily Caller report, the HUD report, which was released today, found that several employees lived over 2,000 miles from the offices they were supposed to work in.
The massive audit spanned across multiple government agencies after Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa requested in back August 2023 that government agencies conduct audits of telework and remote work after a Department of Veterans Affairs employee who attended a staff meeting while taking a bubble bath.
Flipping through channels with a remote is not the same as remote work.
It’s time we get Washington bureaucrats off their couches and back in the office.
Our taxpayers deserve better. pic.twitter.com/IfEJHCGYRT
— Joni Ernst (@SenJoniErnst) September 7, 2023
According to the report, HUD established the Flexiplace program to regulate remote and telework in 2022, defining teleworkers as employees who report to the office on a set number of days and remote workers as employees who don’t show up at an office.
The report also noted that at least 30 employees lived more than 1,000 miles away from their on-site work location, while another 35 did not have valid data.
“Five of these employees had Flexiplace agreements indicating that they commuted more than 2,000 miles every week from one side of the United States to the other or from the mainland United States to Hawaii,” the report said.
The report also found issues with scheduling work hours and in-office days for employees who had signed Flexiplace agreements.
“We identified 66 of 7,710 agreements (1 percent) with schedules that differed from the agreement types, were missing, or did not match full-time work,” the report stated. “The largest group of discrepancies included 41 employees with regular telework agreements who scheduled fewer than the 2 in-office days per pay period that HUD requires for regular teleworkers.”
Acting Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Adrienne Todman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.