Tens of thousands of foreign nationals travel to the United States each year under the H-2A and H-2B visa programs. These programs are designed to fill a temporary need that U.S. workers are unavailable to fill. Employers may use third parties to recruit these workers and recruitment generally takes place outside the United States with limited federal oversight. GAO was mandated to study foreign

Due to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act), both the number of--and funding for--federal employment and training programs have increased since our 2003 report, but little is known about the effectiveness of most programs. In fiscal year 2009, 9 federal agencies spent approximately $18 billion to administer 47 programs--an increase of 3 programs and roughly $5 billion

According to Labor officials, the grant initiatives were designed to shift the focus of the public workforce system toward the training and employment needs of high-growth, in-demand industries, but Labor will be challenged to assess their impact. Under the initiatives, Labor awarded 349 grants totaling almost $900 million to foster this change. However, the grant initiatives were not fully integ

Labor has proposed action steps that one-stops may take to link employers and older workers and has ongoing efforts to promote employment for older workers to a wider audience. While Labor knows little about the results of these efforts, planned evaluations may provide some information on the impact of Workforce Investment Act(WIA) services on older workers. Based on our survey results, we estima

Labor's monitoring of programs it directly oversees has been limited. We found that in 2004 Labor reviewed only 4 percent of programs in the 23 states where it has direct oversight. According to federal program directors in those states, limited staff constrained their ability to do more reviews. Also, Labor has focused in recent years on registering new programs and recruiting apprentices. Altho

The current employment verification (Form I-9) process is based on employers' review of documents presented by new employees to prove their identity and work eligibility. On the Form I-9, employers certify that they have reviewed documents presented by their employees and that the documents appear genuine and relate to the individual presenting the documents. However, document fraud (use of count

In summary, we found that while many states supported streamlined reporting, 36 states indicated that implementing the EMILE system, as proposed, would be very burdensome. Most states indicated that launching EMILE would require as much or more effort than was required of them to meet WIA reporting requirements in 2000. Labor has underestimated the magnitude and type of changes EMILE would requir

Local areas primarily used the WIA program for dropout prevention and other efforts to improve academic achievement for in-school youth. Nationally, about 70 percent of youth served were in school, but percentages ranged from 38 to 86 percent by state. Officials in the five states GAO visited said that they focused on in-school youth because serving out-of-school youth was much more difficult and

Twenty-three states reported using employer tax revenues in 2002 to fund their own employment placement and training programs, and states most often provided job-specific training for workers. States used various types of employer taxes and reported spending a total of $278 million to address state-specific workforce issues. States invested in a variety of industries, but manufacturing was the mo

About one quarter of the 8,350 plant closures and mass layoffs in 2001 appear subject to WARN's advance notice requirements. Mass layoffs were less likely to be subject to the requirements than plant closures. The difference between mass layoffs and plant closures stems primarily from a rule exempting mass layoffs from WARN's requirements if businesses lay off less than one-third of their workfor