Military Personnel

The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) of 1994 protects millions of people, largely National Guard and Reserve members, as they transition between their federal duties and their civilian employment. The act is intended to eliminate or minimize employment disadvantages to civilian careers that can result from service in the uniformed services. This report examines the extent to which the Departments of Defense (DOD), Labor (DOL), Justice (DOJ), and the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) have achieved this purpose, specifically, the extent to which the agencies (1) have data that indicate the level of compliance with USERRA, (2) have efficiently and effectively conducted educational outreach, and (3) have efficiently and effectively addressed servicemember complaints.

Whether or not overall USERRA compliance has changed is difficult to firmly establish; however, the agencies that support or enforce USERRA have collected formal and informal complaint data and some employer support figures that provide limited insights into compliance. For example, DOL's formal complaint numbers show a possible relationship with the level of the use of the reserve components and the number of complaints. DOD data show that some employers exceed USERRA requirements, but these data have limitations. DOD has only 1 full year of informal complaint data, so it will be several years before DOD can identify any meaningful trends in informal complaints. Because informal complaint figures have not been captured on a consistent basis, agencies lack the data necessary to identify total complaint trends. Furthermore, data from a 2004 DOD survey showed that at least 72 percent of National Guard and Reserve members with USERRA problems never sought assistance for their problems. This raises questions as to whether complaint numbers alone can fully explain USERRA compliance or employer support. Some recently added employment questions on DOD's periodic surveys, if continued, offer the potential to provide insight into compliance and employer support issues. DOD, DOL, and OSC have educated hundreds of thousands of employers and servicemembers about USERRA, but the efficiency and effectiveness of this outreach is hindered by a lack of employer information. DOD's reserve component members who can be involuntarily called to active duty are required to enter their civilian employer information into a DOD database but the services have not enforced this requirement and as of August 2005, about 40 percent of the members had not entered the required information. Without information about the full expanse of servicemember employers, federal agencies have conducted general outreach efforts but have been limited in their ability to efficiently and effectively target educational outreach efforts to employers who actually have servicemember employees. Agency abilities to efficiently and effectively address servicemember complaints are hampered by incompatible data systems, a reliance on paper files, and a segmented process that lacks visibility. The systems that DOD, DOL, DOJ, and OSC use to track USERRA complaints are not compatible. As a result, data collection efforts are sometimes duplicated, and DOL relies on its paper files when transferring or reviewing complaints. This slows the transfer of complaints and limits the ability of DOL managers to conduct effective, timely oversight of complaint files. Furthermore, segmented responsibilities and lack of visibility have led agencies to focus on outputs rather than results. For example, agencies measure complaint processing times but not the elapsed time servicemembers actually wait to have their complaints fully addressed. GAO analysis of 52 complaints that had been closed and reopened two or more times found that recorded processing times averaged 103 days but the actual elapsed times that servicemembers waited to have their complaints fully addressed averaged 619 days.

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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