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By: FEDweek StaffGAO has called out open recommendations to OPM made in prior reports on personnel issues, including persistent skills gaps within and across agencies that “pose a high risk to the nation because they impede the government from cost effectively serving the public and achieving desired results.”
In one of its regular summaries to agencies of recommendations still outstanding, the GAO noted that “strategic management of human capital” has been on its high-risk list since 2001, and that 58 recommendations in that area remain open, 14 of which are deemed high-priority.
The report pointed to a 2022 assessment by OPM found skills gaps in areas such as project management, organizational performance, leadership development, and data analysis. “Establishing an action plan, as we recommended, to address these skills gaps would help OPM improve its capacity to provide human capital services and guidance to agencies, particularly given current agency reorganization and workforce reduction efforts,” it said.
“Enabling personnel mobility is one way to help close those skills gaps. However, we found that OPM does not have reliable data on the extent to which agencies have honored previously granted vetting determinations,” it added.
Further, OPM itself “needs to develop an action plan that includes key information, such as a list of its mission-critical occupations, which occupations have skills gaps, and how it will measure progress toward closing skills gaps within its own workforce.”
Other areas where GAO called for more action include: evaluating the training that managers and supervisors receive on addressing employee misconduct and poor performance; developing a means for agencies to share promising practices and lessons learned in performance management; evaluating the effectiveness of special hiring authorities; and making the GS job classification system “more consistent with the attributes of a modern, effective classification system.”
Also: improving the reliability of federal payroll data to support workforce analytics; preventing improper payments in the FEHB program; strengthening OPM’s IT security and management; digitizing permanent records still in paper form; and inventorying and monitoring software licenses.
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See also,
What to Know About the New Federal Application Process
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