Equal Employment Opportunity

To fulfill its responsibility to identify cases of employment discrimination by federal contractors, the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs uses compliance reviews as its main enforcement strategy. During these reviews, the Office compares the sex and racial composition of the contractor's workforce with that of the workforce of similar contractors in the area. The Office also reviews the contractor's employment policies and practices. In fiscal year 1994, the Office devoted about 80 percent of its enforcement hours to compliance reviews, completing about 4,100 such reviews. The Office's financial and staff resources have declined during the past service years, as have the number of compliance reviews it conducts. From fiscal year 1989 through fiscal year 1994, the number of completed compliance reviewed fell by one-third. One practice the Office uses raises questions about its ability to effectively target potential violators. The Office receives information on the sex and individual racial groups that compose the contractor's workforce, yet the Office aggregates the data on all minority employee in a given company before completing its initial analysis. This practice could cause the Office to overlook companies that discriminate.

GAO found that: (1) OFCCP uses compliance reviews which compare the racial and gender composition of the contractor's workforce with those of similar federal contractors to ensure that federal contractors use nondiscriminatory employment practices; (2) when OFCCP identifies EEO violations during its compliance reviews, it resolves the violations by working with the contractors rather than imposing sanctions on the contractors; (3) OFCCP recommends enforcement proceedings only if the contractor does not correct its EEO violation; (4) OFCCP uses 11 percent and 10 percent, respectively, of its enforcement resources for complaint investigations and compliance support; (5) from 1989 to 1994, OFCCP financial and staff resources decreased 9 percent and 15 percent, respectively, and the number of compliance reviews completed decreased by 33 percent; (6) although OFCCP aggregates data on all minority employees in a given contractor's workforce during the initial selection stage of compliance reviews, it may overlook a contractor's discriminatory practices against one or more particular minority groups; and (7) OFCCP uses aggregate data to identify contractors for compliance reviews because the data produce a large enough number of observations for a statistically valid analysis.

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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