The MSPB and the courts hold federal agencies strictly accountable for properly labeling disciplinary charges and selecting appropriate penalties — and the pressure is on agencies to get it right. Seemingly insignificant choices can have huge impacts on whether or not a charge is reversed. And if the agency fails to properly defend a penalty selection, it will have to modify the penalty and pay the employee’s attorney's fees.

Unfortunately, there’s no one MSPB decision or specific CFR section that details exactly how a charge should be written. And no single MSPB case fully explains the defense of a penalty judgment.

In just 90 minutes, federal employment law expert William Wiley, a former chief counsel with the MSPB, covers the pros and cons of the three formats for framing a charge, as well as:

• The advantages and disadvantages of a labeled charge
• How to find and use charge label elements
• “Charging down and proving up” by careful wording of the proposal letter
• Why proper charging is fundamental to our Constitutional system of justice
• And more!

What's more, you learn how to:

• Construct a charge based only on provable allegations
• Compose a proof chart simultaneously while composing a proposal letter
• Coach a deciding official to ignore facts of record that are not in the proposal letter