Development of an Equal Employment Opportunity Management Information System

An investigation was undertaken to determine whether the problems identified in an earlier report on the management information needs of the equal employment opportunity (EEO) program still exist. Two elements of an integrated system are involved; one system collects and maintains personnel data on current employees, the central personnel data file (CPDF), and another collects and maintains data on applicants for federal employment. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), whose responsibility includes collecting an maintaining personnel data, has already made improvents in providing EEO statistical data on current federal employees, however, further improvements are scheduled. These improvements include refinement of CPDF, but will not be fully implemented until January 1982. However, CPDF can currently provide much of the information needed to evaluate and monitor agency EEO programs.

At the time EEO functions were transferred to EEOC from the Civil Service Commission, the two agencies agreed that OPM would continue to collect and maintain personnel data and to provide data to EEOC to enable it to carry out its new responsibilities. The existing CPDF database needs refining. Two problems of CPDF are that the current minority group designator codes do not conform with the race and ethnic code definitions prescribed by legislation, nor does the current system contain an organization code below the second organizational level. Although, a system on job applicants which collects race, sex, and ethnic data has been created, it is still incomplete and does not fully comply with the intent of the uniform guidelines requirement. However, progress has been made in improving the availability of data to identify the extent, nature, and causes of the government's EEO problems. Although the system's design has limited usefulness for performing longitudinal studies, these deficiencies are minor when compared to the system's overall capabilities.

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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