Under current law, an inspector general (IG) of a federal agency can pay bonuses to employees who identify waste, fraud, or mismanagement of funds. S. 2618 would authorize agencies to pay bonuses to employees who identify unnecessary expenditures from amounts provided for agencies’ salaries and expenses. Under the bill, if an agency’s IG and Chief Financial Officer agree that funds appropriated to the agency are no longer required, then 90 percent of those surplus amounts would be transferred to the Treasury. The agency would retain 10 percent of the surplus funds and could use them to pay a bonus to employees who identified those surplus amounts, or for other authorized purposes.
If appropriated amounts returned to the Treasury are from appropriations enacted before the enactment of S. 2618, the bill would reduce direct spending. If the process envisioned under S. 2618 results in fewer expenditures from funds appropriated in the future, implementing the bill would reduce spending subject to appropriation. However, CBO has no basis for estimating the size of any such reductions under the bill.