The Department of Labor’s Job Corps program helps low-income youth gain job skills at 118 centers across the country. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service operates 24 of the centers. In May 2019, both agencies proposed to return operation of the USDA centers to Labor. Labor proposed closing 9 of the 24 centers based on students' access to centers, and center cost and perform...

The federal government’s Black Lung Disability Trust Fund faces financial challenges and has borrowed billions to cover costs. The Trust pays benefits to certain coal miners when no coal mine operator can be held responsible, or when the liable operator does not pay. Three mine operator bankruptcies have further strained Trust finances by transferring $865 million in estimated benefit responsib...

The National Mediation Board (NMB) helps airlines and railways and their related unions resolve labor disputes that could disrupt commerce in those industries. We are required by law to review NMB’s programs and activities every 2 years. NMB implemented our prior recommendation to improve ethical standards for employees seeking outside employment; 6 others remain open. Also, NMB doesn’t have...

Job Corps centers reported 13,673 safety and security incidents involving students from July 2016 to June 2017, according to GAO's analysis of the Department of Labor's (DOL) Employment and Training Administration's (ETA) data. Most reported incidents occurred onsite and involved recently enrolled male students under age 20. During that time, the program served about 79,000 students at 125 Job Cor...

The National Mediation Board (NMB), which facilitates labor relations for railroads and airlines, has implemented five of the eight recommendations GAO made in its December 2013 and February 2016 reports (see table). The three remaining recommendations—on information security, information privacy, and rail grievance arbitration—are not yet fully implemented.Regarding information security, GAO...

Department of Labor (DOL) data show that some states have formal warning policies that allow Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants to receive benefits after the first discovered occurrence of their failing to meet work search requirements while most states do not have such policies. As a result, states are inconsistent in whether they report such benefit payments as overpayments, which has an impa...

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) cannot accurately track the amount of work time employees spend on union representational activities, referred to as official time, agency-wide because it does not have a standardized way for its facilities to record and calculate official time. Specifically:Recording official time—VA uses two separate time and attendance systems that capture official time...

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) cannot accurately track the amount of work time employees spend on union representational activities, referred to as official time, agency-wide because it does not have a standardized way for its facilities to record and calculate official time. Specifically:Recording official time —VA uses two separate time and attendance systems that capture official ti...

Federal agencies made limited use of special government employees (SGE) not serving on federal boards. As of December 2014, approximately 3 percent of SGEs (1,138 of 40,424) were working as experts or consultants and not serving on federal boards, according to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE). Over a 10-year period (2005 to 2014), GAO found that agencies used an annual average of approximatel...

Benefits associated with telework programs include continuity of operations and reduced employee absences, based on GAO's literature review and the experiences of six selected agencies. The benefits most frequently cited by the selected agencies—the Department of Transportation (DOT), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), General Services Administra...