The Department of Veterans Affairs has taken steps to improve its Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (VRE) program, but performance management, workload management, and staff training, but weaknesses remain, GAO has said.
Veterans face numerous challenges that affect their ability to obtain employment, especially related to mental health conditions, working with multiple VRE counselors over time, and civilian employers’ limited understanding of military work experience, according to GAO-14-61.
It said VA has an ongoing initiative to revise its approach for measuring rehabilitation success at the individual employee, regional, and national levels but that the new approach reflects only the number, not the rate of successful outcomes, and therefore would not provide sufficient context for understanding program success.
Further, VA has not fully assessed the reliability of early customer satisfaction results. And while it has taken steps to reduce paperwork burdens on regional offices, several offices still reported heavy workloads and noted that VA’s formula for allocating staff among offices does not consider other staff duties affecting workloads, such as education counseling, GAO said.
The department agreed with recommendations to reflect success rates in revised performance measures, ensure the reliability of its customer satisfaction survey results, reconsider its staff allocation formula, study staff assignments, and close certain gaps in its training for staff.