This is a supplement to our report, Securities and Exchange Commission: Personnel Management Shows Improvement, but Action Needed on Performance Management System, GAO-20-208. It provides the results from our web-based surveys of employees on their views about SEC’s organizational culture and other aspects of working there, such as training, intra-agency communication, leadership, and performanc...

The Securities and Exchange Commission works to protect investors and maintain fair, orderly, and efficient securities markets. To do so, it needs to attract and retain a high-quality workforce. SEC has strengthened its personnel management practices in workforce planning and other areas, but it has not implemented our 2013 recommendation to validate its performance management system by obtaining...

Representation of women on the boards of U.S. publicly-traded companies has been increasing, but greater gender balance could take many years. In 2014, women comprised about 16 percent of board seats in the S&P 1500, up from 8 percent in 1997. This increase was partly driven by a rise in women's representation among new board directors. However, even if equal proportions of women and men joined bo...

Incorporated under Alaska state law, regional Alaska Native corporations share fundamental characteristics, although they have chosen a variety of governance practices. Like other Alaska corporations, the regional corporations are subject to the state's corporate laws (with limited exceptions) and are run by an elected board of directors. Nevertheless, each regional corporation has chosen its own...

Annuities with guaranteed lifetime withdrawals can help older Americans ensure they do not outlive their assets, but do present some risks to consumers. Two such products, variable annuities with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits (VA/GLWB) and contingent deferred annuities (CDA), share a number of features but have some important structural differences. For example, both provide consumers wi...

The federal-state TANF partnership makes significant resources available to address poverty in the lives of families with children. With these resources, TANF has provided a basic safety net to many families and helped many parents step into jobs. At the same time, there are questions about the strength and breadth of the TANF safety net. Many eligible families—some of whom have very low inco...

This testimony discusses issues related to possible changes to the Federal Employees' Compensation Act (FECA) program, a topic that we have reported on in the past. At the end of chargeback year 2010, the FECA program, administered by the Department of Labor (Labor) had paid more than $1.88 billion in wage-loss compensation, impairment, and death benefits, and another $898.1 million for medical an...

This testimony discusses issues related to possible changes to the Federal Employees' Compensation Act (FECA) program, a topic that we have reported on in the past. At the end of chargeback year 2010, the FECA program, administered by the Department of Labor (Labor) paid more than $1.88 billion in wage-loss compensation, impairment, and death benefits, and another $898.1 million for medical and re...

This testimony discusses the findings from our recent work on federal employment and training programs and our prior work on the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA). GAO has recently identified 47 federally-funded employment and training programs for fiscal year 2009, defining them as programs that are specifically designed to enhance the job skills of individuals in order to increase their emp...

This testimony discusses the Department of Labor's (Labor) procedures for determining prevailing wage rates under the Davis-Bacon Act. Davis-Bacon wages must be paid to workers on certain federally funded construction projects, and their vulnerability to the use of inaccurate data has long been an issue for Congress, employers, and workers. More recently, the passage of the American Recovery and R...