The Nation - News from Nov. 16, 1988

FBI agents in New York City have been given a 25% pay increase--more than six times the raise for agents elsewhere--in an effort to solve a staffing crisis. As part of the same five-year project to entice agents and staffers to work in New York, those who agree to move to the nation’s largest city for specified periods also will receive lump-sum bonuses of $20,000. The pay increases were set up by the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 1989, which was signed into law Sept. 29. So while FBI agents elsewhere in America receive an average base salary of $39,000 a year, New York agents at that level got raises to $48,750, an FBI spokesman said. FBI agents and staffers in other offices will then receive the same 4.1% raise that other federal workers will get on Jan. 1. Some 300 jobs are vacant in the New York bureau because pay has not kept pace with the city’s cost of living.