Federal Hiring

The Veterans' Preference Act of 1944 requires federal agencies to give veterans preferential treatment in hiring as a way of thanking them for defending the United States. GAO found that while preference points and rankings have been correctly applied in veterans' applications, veterans are often not hired. Agency officials passed over almost 80 percent of the veterans ranked first on Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and executive agency certificates and instead chose no one--a practice allowed by existing civil service laws and regulations. OPM does not know why certificates are often returned without anyone being selected nor does it know why differences in veteran hiring patterns occur among agencies. Congress may wish to pursue this matter further after hiring patterns are more fully known and analyzed.

GAO found that: (1) as of September 1990, veterans made up about 30 percent of the non-Postal Service federal workforce, double their percentage in the civilian labor force; (2) qualified veterans applying for federal jobs may claim 5 or 10 preference points over the points that all candidates receive for education, work experience, and test scores; (3) federal agencies are required by law to hire veterans who score higher than or equal to nonveterans on the same hiring lists; (4) agencies properly assigned veterans' preference points in 99.7 percent of 1,862 applications GAO reviewed, and also correctly placed veterans on certificates of eligible job candidates; (5) the preference points appear to only minimally affect nonveteran applicants, because of the low number of veterans entering the federal workforce; (6) high placement on the certificates does not ensure the selection of veterans, since hiring officials can use various methods to identify and recruit candidates, including the Outstanding Scholar Program, internal transfers and promotions, and direct hire authority; (7) OPM does not enforce the requirement that agencies explain why they did not use certificates; and (8) OPM does not adequately track, monitor, or analyze agencies' use or nonuse of certificates or their veteran hiring practices. GAO also found that, while state and local governments employ about 12 percent of all employed veterans in the civilian labor force, an examination of 10 state governments' hiring practices indicated that they offer veterans less hiring preference than the federal government does.

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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