Accepting Promotional Benefits

Standards of Conduct Counselors so often find themselves in the role of heavy, delivering bad news. How would you like to deliver some good news for a change?

On returning from Lenny Loewentritt's excellent briefing on travel at yesterday's IEC meeting (slides available here), I tried a little experiment. About 40% of the employees in my agency that I queried were not aware that federal employees can now accept promotional items like frequent flier miles, upgrades, access to airline clubs or facilities. Many employees remember the old rule that barred acceptance of such benefits, and are not aware that it was changed in 2002 by Section 1116 of Pub. L. 107-107, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2002.

If your agency is like mine, a little employee awareness-raising may be in order.