Federal Workforce

Selected Sites Cannot Show Fair and Open Competition for Temporary Jobs Gao ID: GGD-90-106 September 5, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed six federal agencies' use of their authority to hire temporary employees without the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) approval, to determine whether: (1) selected agencies complied with merit selection requirements; and (2) those agencies made temporary appointments for appropriate reasons.

GAO found that: (1) 11 agency installations reported that they complied with merit principles when making temporary appointments, but did not maintain sufficient documentation to assess their compliance; (2) the lack of documentation made it difficult to assess whether agencies ensured fair and equal consideration of all qualified and interested job candidates; (3) OPM documentation requirements were not clearly stated and agencies lacked written procedures for describing the reasons for making temporary appointments; (4) of the 130 temporary appointments reviewed, 97 appeared to be appropriate for hiring temporary employees; (5) agencies made 25 percent of the reviewed appointments to fill permanent needs, which appeared to be inappropriate and could have violated the merit principle of fair and open competition; and (6) some agencies were not making the internal reviews required by OPM for temporary appointment authority.

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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