The Labor Department's decentralized organizational structure makes adopting the improved management practices envisioned by the Government Performance and Results Act a big challenge, the General Accounting Office has concluded in a new report.
According to the report, the fact that the department's diverse functions are carried out by more than 1,000 different offices across the country makes it difficult to develop and monitor departmentwide goals.
"Articulating a comprehensive mission statement, which is linked to results-oriented goals, objectives and performance measures, is difficult because of the historical lack of central planning and the existing structure," the audit agency found.
When draft strategic plans were due to Congress last year, the Labor Department presented individual plans for 15 of its 24 component offices along with a strategic plan overview, which contained five departmentwide goals. Those goals were: lifelong learning and skill development; promoting welfare to work; enhancing pension and health benefits security; maintaining safe, healthy and equal opportunity workplaces; helping working Americans balance work and family; and maintaining a department strategic management process.
When Congressional Republicans graded agencies' preliminary plans, Labor's received a score of only 6.5 out of 100. GAO then reviewed the plan and offered several suggestions, such as revamping the department's mission statement.
Although the final draft submitted to Congress Sept. 30 addressed several of GAO's concerns, the plan still fell short, the auditors concluded.
Unclear goals continued to cloud the Labor Department's mission statement, GAO said. For example, no single stated departmentwide goal of reducing workplace fatalities was included in the report. Instead, four separate department agencies claimed that as a goal.
When Congressional Republicans graded agencies' final strategic plans in early November, the Labor Department received an "F."
Labor's strategic planning problems are aggravated by the fact that the department is not equipped to measure performance because it does not effectively manage its information, GAO said. The auditors also concluded that Labor needs to make greater use of program evaluations.
"The overview plan does not detail how information from evaluations was used to develop the plan, nor does it specify how future evaluations will help assess Labor's success in achieving its stated goals," the report said.
GAO also found that the reliability of the department's management information is questionable. For example, while reviewing the Employment and Training Agency's Job Corps program, GAO determined that reported information did not provide an accurate picture of program results. A GAO survey of employers who were reported as hiring Job Corps participants showed that about 15 percent of the job placements were invalid.
The Labor Department is also particularly susceptible to information security and Year 2000 problems, GAO concluded. According to the report, Labor is at a greater risk of failure because it maintains multiple computer systems, operated by several contractors, incorporating a variety of differing characteristics.
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