Federal Manager's Daily Report

The 2010 Gulf Coast oil spill underscored the importance of supervising oil and gas production, GAO has said, but the Interior Department faces challenges in filling the positions needed to do that.

Two factors that GAO identified as hampering Interior the most in its efforts to hire and retain staff are familiar to agencies in general: lower salaries and a lengthier hiring process compared with private industry.

To address the first issue, Interior started paying higher “special rate” salaries and increased the use of retention incentive payments and student loan reimbursements. “However, we found that Interior doesn’t know if these efforts are working,” a report said.

The department is using new human resources software that it hopes will provide better data to track the hiring process, the report said, but its various bureaus are missing opportunities to improve hiring, for example by using separate recruitment teams that do not collaborate.

The department also initiated training without determining what was needed and hasn’t determined whether its training programs are effective, GAO said.