A new report from the Government Accountability Office
says the management of employment rights for those called
to active military duty could be improved. Those rights
apply to federal employees who are called up, as many
thousands have been in recent years, as well as to private
sector employees.
The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights
Act is intended to minimize disadvantages to returning to
civilian employment following deployment — usually for
National Guard and Reserve duty. But after looking at data
compiled by the Departments of Defense, Labor, Justice, and
the Office of Special Counsel, GAO said it’s difficult to
assess overall compliance because of insufficient tracking.
Formal complaint figures do show some trends, for example,
DOL’s formal complaint numbers correlate the level of reserve
component deployments and the number of complaints, and DoD
data show some employers exceeding USERRA requirements even
though it only has one year of data to draw from, according
to GAO-06-60.
It said however, that because informal complaint figures have
not been consistently captured, agencies lack the necessary
data to identify trends.
DoD reservists are required to enter civilian employer
information into a database when called up, but the services
have not enforced the requirement and as of August 2005 the
database only has information for about 60 percent of those
called up, GAO said.
It said this has prevented federal outreach efforts from
efficiently and effectively targeting employers with
service-member employees.
