March 10, 2004

Mr. Sam Vitaro

Re: INS FLSA Update

Dear Arbitrator Vitaro:

This letter is to provide you with an update of the Union’s activities to comply with both your orders of December 10, 2003, and the recent (February) set of arbitration hearings.

In the February set of arbitration hearings you allowed/ordered that additional information should be collected by the Union for the following claimants (identified by SSN):

[SSN’s Removed for Security Purposes]

Letters have been sent to each of these claimants asking the specific question(s) that was at issue during the February arbitration set.

The Union has been working diligently to gather and submit the information on “new claimants”, “newly excluded old claimants”, and (Form C) information for “suffer or permit” claimants” (who are “old claimants”) as ordered by you on December 10, 2003. We are currently beta testing a new website that collects the following data:

This website is designed to meet four (4) different but equally important goals:

1. Provide a central and reliable location for interested DHS/INS (and former INS) employees to check whether they are claimants in this grievance.
2. Collect current contact information for all claimants
3. Provide an opportunity for claimants to respond to Agency allegations that they should be excluded from the claimant list and thereby receive nothing from this grievance. This part of the site will allow a particular “new claimant” or “newly excluded old claimant” to make specific responses to each of the allegations that the Agency has provided, as to why that particular claimant should not properly be in the claimant class.
4. Collect documents and other (Form C) evidence to support “suffer or permit” claims that were filed by certain claimants in the late fall of 2001.

The Union decided to develop a website that would do all of the above rather than have separate websites that would require multiple entrances and repetitive data input. We have been slowed by our security requirements for a site that both allows the input of data (which is relatively easy to protect), as well as allow a claimant to access a database of sensitive information (which is much more difficult to develop). We are near the end of the development of the new site and expect to begin beta testing (troubleshooting) the site by the end of this week (March 19, 2004). Our goal is to have the site up, running, and accessible to all claimants by March 26, 2004. We are going to allow three weeks (21 days) for claimants to provide information via both the website and via mail (postmarked). We are aiming to be able to provide the information collected from our website to the Agency by the end of April. While this timetable both beats some of the goals set forth in your December 10, 2003 order, it also may delay several others. The Union believes that providing a centralized data collection site at this stage will, ultimately, speed the resolution of claims in this case. We officially ask the Arbitration to amend his orders of December 10, 2003, to allow for the Union’s proposed timetable.

We will of course, keep you updated on the progress of our data collection efforts. If I may clarify the Union’s position or be of any other assistance, please contact me at your convenience.

Sincerely,

Joe Goldberg
Assistant General Counsel - Litigation

cc: Elir Tsungu
Randy Callahan
Rodrigo Munera, Web Site Administrator