Time to Hire: Using More Reliable Data Could Help GAO Monitor The Length of Its Hiring Process

Filed 1w ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Investigations

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

The Government Accountability Office's internal watchdog found that GAO's hiring of employees in mission-critical roles like contracting and IT took about 103 days on average in fiscal 2024, missing its own internal targets of 98 to 101 days and blowing well past the executive branch's 80-day governmentwide goal.

The inspector general also found that GAO's own tracking of this problem was unreliable: about 30 percent of MCO hires were excluded from its timeliness calculations, the dates used for when hiring began were often inaccurate, and internal documents disagreed with each other about what the target time frame even was.

GAO agreed to two of the four recommendations outright and pushed back on the other two, prompting the OIG to rewrite them into more specific instructions about defining hiring actions and documenting start dates.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

GAO exists to tell Congress and the country when federal agencies are sloppy with their own numbers, so there is a certain poetry in its own workforce data turning out to be undercounted, mistimed, and self-contradictory. The agency's response — partial agreement, some pushback, a rewritten recommendation — is exactly the kind of bureaucratic shuffle GAO reports usually describe about someone else. Perhaps the next audit target should just be a mirror.

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: Investigations · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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