Employee Drug Testing

A Single Agency Is Needed to Manage Federal Employee Drug Testing Gao ID: GGD-91-25 January 18, 1991

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined how 18 federal agencies implemented their employee drug testing programs to determine whether centralized management could improve the administration of such programs.

GAO found that: (1) no single federal agency was responsible for overseeing the implementation of all federal employee drug testing efforts; (2) only 6 of the agencies fully implemented all required aspects of their drug testing programs; (3) other agencies did not test employees because of lack of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) certification, court injunctions, and union negotiations; (4) disciplinary actions for employees who tested positive varied among agencies; (5) the percentage of sensitive positions designated for random drug testing among agencies ranged from .8 to 100 percent of the total work force and the testing frequency ranged from 4 to 100 percent of such employees per year; (6) agencies paid from $8.90 to over $87 for the same drug testing services; (7) two agencies failed to comply with quality assurance procedures; (8) 11 of the agencies failed to submit required reports to Congress; and (9) HHS failed to notify all federal agencies of a problem in distinguishing a legal form of methamphetamine from an illegal one.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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