Federal Contractor Hiring

The Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1972 seeks to promote the employment of disabled and Vietnam veterans by federal contractors. Although federal contractors and state job service centers are generally meeting the requirements of the legislation, the impact of the law on the number of veterans actually hired by federal contractors is unclear. No reliable means has been established for evaluating the impact of these efforts on veteran employment levels or for producing data needed to carry out such an evaluation. In addition, the Department of Labor is limiting employment opportunities for veterans by narrowly defining job openings that are suitable for listing with state job service centers. Labor has defined suitable job openings as those paying less than $25,000 per year, an interpretation that seems inconsistent with the law's intent of increasing the numbers of jobs listed with state job service centers and that unnecessarily limits opportunities for veterans, most of whom are now in midcareer.

GAO found that: (1) in general, federal contractors and state job service centers are meeting legislative requirements to consider veterans for employment; (2) although federal contractors' affirmative action plans generally comply with required hiring procedures, they focus on compliance rather than outcome; (3) most contractors do not list jobs paying above $25,000 per year with state job service centers because of the Department of Labor's (DOL) salary limitation; (4) although most contractors submit reports on the number of special disabled and Vietnam-era veterans currently employed and hired during the previous year, DOL does not use the information to evaluate the adequacy of veteran hiring; (5) the impact of veterans' priority referrals cannot be determined due to the lack of relevant information; (6) contractors' reporting of their total number of employees would allow DOL to determine the impact of veteran affirmative action legislation on federal and private contractors' hiring practices and better target its contractor compliance evaluations; and (7) legislative provisions concerning Vietnam-era veterans may need to be revised, since the number of those veterans entering the workforce is declining and they have a lower unemployment rate than nonveterans.

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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