Estimates of Federal Employees' Available Time for Work Distort Work Force Requirements

For many years, considerable attention has been paid to estimating overall work in determining the Federal Government's civilian personnel requirements. However, little attention has been paid to the availability of the work force--the portion of time that workers are available to perform their primary duties after deducting the time they are unavailable because of absence. Eight Federal agencies were surveyed to determine the reliability of the processes and data used to estimate the availability of Federal civilian workers.

The Office of Management and Budget has not provided guidance on how to estimate worker availability in computing personnel requirements. Estimates are often inconsistent and are based on old, incomplete, and unsupported data. The eight agencies surveyed differed in the absences they recognize in estimating availability: two account for annual leave earned rather than that taken, two do not account for administrative or other leave, and one does not account for training. Requirements may be either overstated or understated due to the lack of consistent, current, and reliable availability estimates. While the total number of workers estimated may not be understated or overstated, they may not be properly distributed if variances in availability among groups of workers within the agency are not accounted for.

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.

Director: No director on record Team: No team on record Phone: No phone on record