Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs' (OFCCP) oversight of federal contractors' equal employment opportunity (EEO) practices, focusing on: (1) OFCCP fulfillment of its mission and responsibilities; (2) changes in OFCCP resources in recent years; and (3) whether the OFCCP selection procedure for contractor reviews could mask discrimination against specific minority groups.

GAO found that: (1) OFCCP uses compliance reviews which compare the racial and gender composition of the contractor's workforce with those of similar federal contractors to ensure that federal contractors use nondiscriminatory employment practices; (2) when OFCCP identifies EEO violations during its compliance reviews, it resolves the violations by working with the contractors rather than imposing sanctions on the contractors; (3) OFCCP recommends enforcement proceedings only if the contractor does not correct its EEO violation; (4) OFCCP uses 11 percent and 10 percent, respectively, of its enforcement resources for complaint investigations and compliance support; (5) from 1989 to 1994, OFCCP financial and staff resources decreased 9 percent and 15 percent, respectively, and the number of compliance reviews completed decreased by 33 percent; (6) although OFCCP aggregates data on all minority employees in a given contractor's workforce during the initial selection stage of compliance reviews, it may overlook a contractor's discriminatory practices against one or more particular minority groups; and (7) OFCCP uses aggregate data to identify contractors for compliance reviews because the data produce a large enough number of observations for a statistically valid analysis.