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GAO-13-144R 1 (2013-07-02)

handle is hein.gao/gaobaahbz0001 and id is 1 raw text is: G A U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 441 G St. N.W. Washington, DC 20548 July 2, 2013 The Honorable Seth D. Harris Acting Secretary U.S. Department of Labor Subject: Actions Needed to Improve the Transparency and Reliability of Labor's Data on the H-2A Program Dear Acting Secretary Harris: At the request of the Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, Poultry, Marketing, and Agriculture Security, we recently issued a report about how the Department of Labor (Labor) processes applications from employers seeking temporary foreign agricultural workers under the H-2A program, which allows U.S. employers anticipating a shortage of domestic agricultural workers to hire foreign workers on a temporary basis.1 As part of that review, we examined Labor's annual data on the number of H-2A applications filed, the number of H-2A worker positions requested, and the number of worker positions approved by Labor to determine whether we could rely on that data for reporting trends in H-2A visa program demand and usage.2 The purpose of this letter is to summarize our key findings on the reliability of the data and the internal controls identified during our prior work. This letter contains three recommendations for your consideration to improve the transparency and reliability of the H-2A data we reviewed. Results in Brief In pursuing the work on our 2012 report, we found that the number of applications submitted by employers to Labor for H-2A worker positions, the number of H-2A worker positions requested, and the number of worker positions approved by Labor cited in Labor's annual performance reports sometimes differed from those reported by Labor in the data files it makes available to the public on its website (data files). We also found that, in almost three quarters of the cases, the data reported from applications submitted on behalf of multiple employers contained inconsistencies. In 1,469 of the 2,010 multi-employer applications filed between fiscal year (FY) 2006 and FY 2012 (73 percent), the total number of H-2A worker positions requested did not match the sum of the number of worker positions for each of the individual employers listed on the application. On other multi-employer applications, some or all of the employers listed were shown as not requesting any worker positions at all. We found that Labor lacked the internal controls to monitor and prevent these inconsistencies. As a consequence of these differences and inconsistencies, we were unable to rely on the data to draw conclusions about year-to-year trends in usage of the H-2A program and, in some cases, we found the data to be unreliable in 1 GAO, H-2A Visa Program: Modernization and Improved Guidance Could Reduce Employer Application Burden, GAO-12-706 (Washington, D.C.: Sept. 12, 2012). 2 Labor uses the term worker position to refer to the number of individual jobs that an employer is seeking permission to fill with foreign workers. In some cases, an individual worker may fill more than one worker position. GAO-1 3-144R Labor's H-2A Data