Pay & Benefits

Case could determine if cash awards can be given to feds

Was a $383,600 award to former Interior Department employee Robert Berman legal?

Federal News Network Staff

August 12, 2010 11:09 am

< a min read

Was a $383,600 award to former Interior Department employee Robert Berman legal? A federal appeals court ruling last week didn’t answer that question, but it did reject a jury’s earlier decision that it was not legal. The story of the award began in 1994, when Berman, a senior economist at Interior who has since retired, began helping the Project on Government Oversight draft Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain information on oil and gas companies that were underpaying royalties to the Minerals Management Service for drilling on federal and Indian lands. Read more about the facts of the case, and where it stands now, in the Federal Times.

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