Force account labor: what FEMA reimburses and how to document it

FEMA force account labor is usually the first cost category our team documents for an applicant, and McGee Disaster Consulting Group builds that record so your staff do not have to. “Force account” is FEMA’s term for work you perform with your own employees and equipment rather than through contractors. It is often the largest part of an emergency work claim and an area where costs are frequently questioned at review for lack of supporting records. The rules are manageable. The discipline is the hard part.

The eligibility matrix

Budgeted employees are permanent staff whose pay is already in your budget. Unbudgeted hours are the ones the disaster created: temporary hires, part-time or seasonal staff working outside their normal hours or season, essential employees called back from a budget furlough, and staff whose salaries come from an outside grant who are reassigned to work that grant does not fund. A reassigned employee is reimbursed at their normal rate, not at the rate of the work they are doing, because the normal rate is your actual cost.

The pay policy decides the overtime

Under the policy guide, FEMA evaluates your pre-disaster written labor policy on three points. Does it avoid any clause that makes payment contingent on federal funding? Is it applied uniformly whether or not there is a presidential declaration? Does it set non-discretionary criteria for when each pay type is activated? Where a policy does not meet these conditions, the guide provides that FEMA may limit reimbursement to non-discretionary, uniformly applied rates. “Pre-disaster” means before the first day of the incident period in the declaration, so a policy adopted after the storm does not apply to this event, though it positions you for the next one.

Two groups deserve attention. Second-level supervisors and above, such as department directors, chiefs and elected officials, are generally exempt from overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the guide treats their overtime as eligible only when the record shows the person worked directly on a specific project, you normally charge their time to projects regardless of federal funding, and your policy pays that overtime. The second group is backfill. Under the guide, when someone covers the regular duties of an employee who is doing eligible emergency work, only the backfill’s overtime is eligible if the backfill is a budgeted employee. Straight time is eligible only when the backfill is a temporary or contracted worker, or a permanent employee called in on a scheduled day off, and only for a limited period that you track.

What FEMA force account labor documentation has to prove

For small projects the policy guide allows an itemized summary: the number of employees, budgeted and unbudgeted hours, and average straight-time and overtime rates with fringe. For large projects the Public Assistance Program and Policy Guide expects, for each employee, the name, job title and function, employee type (full-time exempt, non-exempt, part-time, temporary), dates and hours worked, pay rate and fringe rate, a description of the work performed supported by daily logs or activity reports, timesheets and the fringe benefit calculations, together with the pay policy itself. FEMA may validate a sample rather than every record, which means every record has to be able to stand on its own.

A crew sheet built for review

• One sheet per crew per day, listing each employee, the site or work order, start and stop times and the task performed.
• Supervisor signature, and hours reconciled to the payroll register before anything is submitted.
• Equipment listed beside its operator, with hours only while in use, under the FEMA equipment code or your own approved rate policy.
• A fringe worksheet showing the straight-time and overtime percentages you actually paid.
• Photos labeled with the same site names used on the sheets.

How McGee Disaster Consulting Group helps

FEMA force account labor records are built by our team from the first day of the response. McGee Disaster Consulting Group brings together people who have built force account packages in the field and people who have reviewed them for FEMA and for states. Both perspectives lead to the same practice: the labor policy is read before the first pay period is submitted, crew sheets are designed around FEMA’s documentation table rather than retrofitted to it, and fringe is calculated from the payroll system instead of estimated. That work sits at the center of PA Grant Management.