Staffing shortages slow vets’ employment counseling

Two years after signing an agreement to coordinate their employment services for disabled veterans, the Veterans Affairs and Labor departments are still struggling to work through staffing challenges and to share information effectively, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

VA provides employment counseling at 57 regional centers, which are staffed by federal employees. The Labor Department, in contrast, provides grants to state-run agencies. One goal of the agreement was to make it easier for veterans to transfer between the assistance provided by VA counselors and that given by state employees, and to prevent overlap between the services.

"The agreement provides for a state workforce agency staff member to be collocated at VA or provide itinerant coverage to VA clients, to the extent it is appropriate and feasible," the report (GAO-07-1020) said. "We were told that not all state workforce agencies feel they have a sufficient number of veterans' representatives to implement this provision."

Collocating state and VA employees was intended to make sure that services don't overlap, an experience that veterans told GAO they sometimes found frustrating or contradictory.

State-level staff shortages also made it difficult to track veterans after they left VA employment counseling to see if they found and kept jobs for 180 days, GAO noted.

The report cited staffing shortages at VA as well. Since the agreement was signed, 74 employment coordinators have been trained and deployed to the regional VA offices.

"VA national officials acknowledged that the current number of employment coordinators is not enough to provide a full array of employment services to all participants," the report stated. "They told us they tried to compensate for this deficiency by assigning employment coordinators to offices in the most populous areas and expected that state workforce agency staff would serve veterans in other locales."

As a result, GAO found that "VA may not be providing all veterans in a regional office's jurisdiction with equal access to the full array of services from an employment coordinator."

The lack of staffing also means that VA employees were only available at job resource centers on an as-needed basis, rather than full time.

"Some veterans were able to use the labs with minimal guidance," the report found, but "others told us they needed the assistance provided by VA staff when they were first introduced to the labs."

Because staffing has prevented partnerships from getting up and running, it has been hard for Labor and VA to implement another part of the agreement -- evaluating employees based on the effectiveness of the partnerships.

"Labor has implemented such standards for state VETS program directors," GAO said. "These provisions are not specifically outlined in the performance standards for other VETS program staff or for VA staff."

But some of the officials that GAO spoke with during site visits in five states said it would be "impractical" to evaluate employees on the basis of the partnerships' performance, and said staffers already are evaluated on teamwork and cooperation.

In addition to sharing staffing, the agreement said VA and state employees were supposed to share data about veterans' wages and barriers to employment, but GAO's field visits found that privacy laws and a lack of interest were barriers to sharing that information. For example, Michigan law blocks the sharing of wage information with VA, while South Dakota state officials said they rarely received requests for information.

Neither Labor nor VA officials objected to the report's conclusions and recommendations.

Charles Ciccolella, assistant secretary for the Veterans' Employment and Training Service at the Labor Department, said his office would "review possible alternatives to the actual release of wage record data that may be prohibited from sharing by various state privacy laws."

In his response, outgoing VA Secretary Jim Nicholson said, "Since the employment coordinator is a relatively new position, VA will continue to evaluate its effectiveness."