IT hiring at GAO lags watchdog’s own timeframes, OIG finds

The Government Accountability Office’s hiring process for IT positions lagged behind timeline targets set by the Office of Personnel Management and the watchdog itself, a report from the agency’s Office of Inspector General found.

In an audit of the GAO’s fiscal 2024 hiring for governmentwide mission critical occupations (MCOs), the OIG reported that it took the independent agency an average of 105.4 days to hire for IT management positions. 

That figure wasn’t far off from the GAO’s own internal hiring target of 98 to 101 days — but it was roughly 11 days behind the OPM time-to-hire dashboard goal of 94.6 days. The GAO hired 45 staffers to IT management roles in fiscal 2024, per the report. 

The GAO’s Human Capital Office told the OIG that the agency’s longer hiring runways are due to several interviewing steps, including panels with subject matter experts, eligibility and qualification determination reviews and analysis, and occasionally multiple rounds of interviews.

“However, GAO is competing with agencies across the federal government for comparable MCO positions,” the OIG wrote. “In some instances, GAO may also be competing with private employers for candidates. With a longer hiring process, GAO risks not meeting its stated goal of hiring ‘well-qualified staff’ because these candidates may accept other job opportunities while waiting for GAO to complete its hiring process.”

Though the audit covered a time period at the GAO two years ago, the watchdog continues to face IT workforce issues — though many of those issues are beyond its control. 

During a March hearing before the House Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee, acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown told lawmakers that a wave of retirements following funding fights left the GAO’s IT division “particularly hard hit.”

“They’ve lost a fair number of resources, so it has an impact on the organization,” Brown said. “We worked really hard to try to minimize that impact.”

Jennifer Franks, director of the GAO’s Center for Enhanced Cybersecurity, Information Technology & Cybersecurity Team, told FedScoop at the time that the group was “continuing to push forward” on IT modernization projects while still delivering on its work for Congress.

“These efforts haven’t stopped just because resources are tight — it has just required us to be more thoughtful and strategic in how we move and prioritize,” Franks said.

In the new report, the GAO told OIG that it was fully on board with two of its recommendations: to develop and document a plan to occasionally review hiring timelines and combat inefficiencies in hiring systems, and to evaluate target hiring timeframes, with rationales and updated internal documents included as part of that process. 

The GAO partially pushed back on two other recommendations — on changes to time-to-hire calculations, and new controls to better document the beginning of hiring actions. OIG revised both recommendations and said it would monitor how the watchdog addresses them.

“To address its management challenge of hiring and maintaining a highly-qualified workforce, GAO needs reliable data to calculate how long it takes to hire employees,” OIG concluded. “With accurate and complete calculations, GAO could more effectively determine whether it meets its goals for the length of its hiring process.”