Nation: Tales from the Jungle

No federal agency is without its tales of bureaucracy gone awry. Samples:

The Persecuted Criminal. A Department of Housing and Urban Development field office got 25 names through the Civil Service roster to fill several temporary clerk-typist positions for a year. The office superintendent, a white man, selected seven people (four women and three men) from nine applicants, all of whom were black. One of the rejected applicants, Mr. P., on probation for assault, complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Office that he had been the victim of race and sex discrimination. The superintendent admitted that he had rejected F. because of his criminal record. F. was given one year’s employment retroactively because, it was reasoned, blacks are arrested for assault more often than whites, so F. was discriminated against because of race.

Tax Dodging at IRS. The IRS dismissed two employees, Margaret Boyce and Minnie Dixon, for neglecting to pay their own taxes on time. Boyce, a G52 data transcriber, and Dixon, a G53 file clerk, contended that they relied on their husbands to file the returns and won their appeal to the regional Civil Service Commission and the Appeals Review Board. But the IRS, arguing that it was a bad precedent for IRS workers not to send in their own returns, persuaded the full commission to uphold the workers’ ouster. The women won reinstatement with back pay in the U.S. Court of Claims —four years after they first took on the IRS.

The Pistol-Packing Postman. Beaman Hysmith, a mail carrier, shot a co-worker in the chest. While he was serving his sentence, the Postal Service dismissed him. Hysmith appealed his dismissal and won reinstatement because of a procedural flaw: the same person who proposed Hysmith’s ouster had reviewed the case. The Post Office had to shell out approximately $5,000 in back pay for the time Hysmith was out of work pending his appeal, but with proper paper work it finally axed him permanently.

The Angry Nurses. Two nurses, Sandra Kramer and Valerie Koster, found foul conditions at the Public Health Service Indian Hospital in Shiprock, N. Mex., where they began working in September 1974. They complained to superiors and finally wrote an open letter to President Ford, an action that received considerable local publicity. “The focus here,” they said, “is on filling out forms, doing the least work with the least effort and just getting by.” The Indian Health Service fired the nurses in January 1975 for “lack … [of] ability or … desire to become a responsible employee of the IHS.” Public pressure forced the hospital to rescind the order, and it transferred them instead. The nurses resisted, and so the IHS once again discharged them. Further local pressure resulted in public hearings last year. The IHS encouraged them to reapply to Shiprock; their applications have been pending since last July.

The Trasher. On receiving persistent reports that orders for Government Printing Office publications were not being filled, the GPO secretly marked some fake order forms and tracked down the culprit, a 33-year-old worker who had pitched the marked forms into a wastepaper basket. The GPO removed him, a decision upheld by the Civil Service Commission, but the employee persuaded the commission’s Appeals Review Board to reinstate him on the grounds that he could not be sacked for something no one had seen him do. The clerk got almost full back pay. The GPO then installed TV monitors to spy on the form filers, and now complaints about nonfulfillment have practically disappeared.