Personnel Practices

Questionable Personnel Practices at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Gao ID: GGD-90-43 January 23, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the personnel policies and actions of the former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

GAO compared the number of special assistant, confidential assistant, and senior executive positions created during the former director's tenure and found that the former director: (1) created twice the number of those positions as his immediate predecessor; (2) improperly temporarily assigned two senior executives to nonfederal organizations; and (3) did not properly consider the impact of personnel actions on the FWS budget. GAO also found that: (1) most of the positions created resulted from FWS reorganizations, but a few newly created positions did not meet FWS needs and were not properly defined; (2) the former director did not change the basic responsibilities or geographic locations of positions that existed before his term; and (3) the former director's temporary emergency reassignment did not satisfy an unanticipated, urgent need to fill a position.

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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