Agencies Gave IT Workers $14M in Bonuses in 2009

A look at the week of August 29 in public advocacy for the IT channel: This week, government agencies take steps to expand health IT to rural areas.  States and businesses struggle over sales tax as more transactions take place in cyberspace.  A new report finds that IT workers received millions of dollars in recruitment, retention and relocation incentives in 2009.


HHS, USDA Align To Reach Rural Areas with Health IT — The Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture have signed a memorandum of understanding linking rural hospitals and clinicians to capital loan programs to help them purchase software and hardware needed to implement health IT, reports Healthcare IT News.

States Struggle To Tax Online Commerce — As cloud computing expands, states are beginning to tackle the complicated issue of how to collect tax revenue on intangible items and services crossing state lines.  The murky situation hurts both states, which stand to take a big hit in revenue if they can’t collect on these purchases, and companies forced to spend large amounts of money on tax consultants and then settlements when things go wrong, Bloomberg reports.

Agencies Gave IT Workers $14 Million in Bonuses in 2009 — A new report from the Office of Personnel Management found that 45 agencies paid more than $349 million in recruitment, retention and relocation incentives to employees in occupations critical to agency missions, including information technology, says Nextgov.com.  Specifically, agencies paid out 892 incentives totaling $10.3 million to retain IT managers. Agencies also offered 252 incentives totaling $2.3 million to recruit IT managers, and 125 incentives totaling $1.7 million to relocate IT managers, according to the report.