Workforce Investment Act: Improvements Needed in Performance Measures to Provide a More Accurate Picture of WIA's Effectiveness

United States. General Accounting Office.

United States. General Accounting Office.

关键词: Government accountability -- United States.;    employment;    workforce investment act;    letter report;   

RP-ID  :  GAO-02-275
RP-ID  :  233360

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Congress passed the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) in 1998 to bring most federally funded employment and training services into a single, one one-stop center system. GAO assessed three programs that provide service through this system. States and localities have begun to implement the new performance measurement system for the three WIA-funded programs but report several challenges. States had to change the way they collected and reported performance data. They also faced challenges in implementing these measures due to their complexity and the resource demands created by new measures. Some developed new procedures to obtain access to sensitive records. The performance levels are of particular concern to state and local officials because failure to meet them can result in financial sanctions. As a result, states may be choosing to serve only those job seekers who are most likely to be successful. Even when fully implemented, performance measures may not provide a true picture of WIA-funded program performance because data are neither comparable across states nor timely. The measures include many of the indicators relevant to an employment and training program, such as getting and keeping jobs and increasing wages and skills. Although measures exist to gauge the performance of the three WIA-funded programs, there are no measures to gauge the performance of the one-stop system as a whole. At least 17 programs provide services through the one-stop system, and most have their own performance measures. Although these performance measures may be used for assessing outcomes for individual programs, they cannot be used to measure the success of the overall system."