Introduction of the District of Columbia Court, Offender Supervision, Parole, and Public Defender Employees Equity Act of 2008

Introduction of the District of Columbia Court, Offender Supervision, Parole, and Public Defender Employees Equity Act of 2008

Ms. NORTON. Madam Speaker, today Congressman TOM DAVIS (R-VA) and I introduced a bill that will correct a long overdue oversight affecting the non-judicial employees of the D.C. Courts, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, CSOSA, and the D.C. Public Defender Service, PDS.

Under the 1997 National Capital Revitalization and Self-Government Improvement Act of 1997, the Federal Government took over the operation of the District of Columbia Courts and related services making the non-judicial employees of the D.C. Courts and the employees of CSOSA Federal employees. In 1998, employees of PDS were similarly transferred as part of the District of Columbia Courts and Justice Technical Collections Act. As Federal employees, these court, CSOSA and PDS employees were brought under the Federal Retirement Program, FERS. However, for the employees transferred in 1997 and in 1998, ``creditable service'' for the purposes of determining when they would be eligible to retire and the amount of annuity they would be entitled to under FERS only began from the date of the transfer. That is, the 1997 and 1998 laws made no provision for treating their year of service as court and related services employees prior to these laws as creditable service for retirement.

Accordingly, the bill we introduced today will amend these laws to require that the time served by these employees before 1997 will count towards their overall Federal retirement eligibility as ``creditable service.'' So for example, if an employee is 60 years old today and has worked 20 years (i.e., since 1985) for the D.C. Courts, under our bill he would be eligible for Federal retirement today (whereas without our bill he would have to work another 12 years).

I should also note that to avoid the problem of ``double dipping,'' since the employees are still entitled to their D.C. retirement benefits (based upon their work status up until 1997), our bill does not count the pre-1997 years spent as D.C. government employees towards the amount of Federal retirement annuity an employee is eligible to receive.

However, it is only fair and just that the court and related services employees who started their jobs with the expectation that would be able to retire without penalty after 20 years of service or more should be allowed to do so. Our bill today does just that, it restores their ``lost time.''

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