Entitlement to Overtime Pay for Travel to Training

An Army finance and accounting officer requested an advance decision concerning an employee's claim for overtime pay for travel to and from training on nonworkdays. The employee, an intern with the Army Materiel Development and Readiness Command (DARCOM), claimed a total of 24 hours and 45 minutes of overtime for five separate trips from her duty station to various Government scheduled training programs elsewhere. On the first four trips, the employee was authorized to travel by air; on the fifth trip, she was authorized to travel by privately owned vehicle (POV). For personal reasons, the employee traveled at a time or via a route other than the time or route selected by the agency. Specifically, the finance and accounting officer asked whether DARCOM interns are entitled to overtime compensation under the Fair Labor Standards ACT (FLSA) as amended in 1974 for time spent traveling to training courses where the scheduling is administratively controlled. GAO believed the issue also involved consideration under title 5 of the U.S. Code. The applicable section of the U.S. Code has been interpreted so that travel to a training course scheduled by an employee's agency does not qualify as compensable travel under that section. This has no bearing as to whether such travel is considered to be worked under FLSA. GAO agreed with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) interpretation of travel rules in that, if an agency allows an employee to schedule travel and the employee travels during corresponding hours on a nonworkday, the agency may not subsequently defeat the employee's entitlement to overtime compensation by stating that travel should not have been scheduled in the manner the employee chose. With regard to the travel by POV, the travel time must be computed as that portion of the estimated travel time which would have been considered working time for the actual time necessary to perform the travel. However, since the employee would have been scheduled to travel during nonworking hours for the return trip had she taken a common carrier, she was not entitled to compensation under FLSA for the return portion of the trip. By constructive travel time, GAO determined that the employee was entitled to have 12 hours and 35 minutes credited as hours worked. In addition, any of these hours worked which caused the employee's total hours worked in a week to exceed 40 are compensable as overtime.