Federal agencies are not consistently evaluating the impact of telework on their ability to provide services, said the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a new report issued on Nov. 22.
The report from the watchdog is the first in a series that will look at how agencies have implemented telework and how it has affected their operations and performance during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first four agencies GAO evaluated include the Agriculture Department’s Farm Service Agency (FSA), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) component, and the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), which is part of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
For this report, GAO collected and analyzed the agencies’ telework data from July 2019 through December 2023. Telework – which is distinct from remote work – is where employees are expected to report to an agency location on a regular basis and have regularly scheduled days where they work from an alternate worksite.
Telework use varied among the four Federal agencies and components that GAO reviewed. For example, telework use at FSA was 11 percent of total hours worked, while at VBA telework use was around 66 percent.
Agency officials told GAO that changes in telework use affected recruitment, hiring, and retention in various ways.
For example, IRS officials said that telework helped the agency recruit customer service representatives by expanding the potential talent pool to people who lived further away from agency locations. USCIS’s analysis of its hiring data found telework availability significantly increased applicant interest in positions, and FSA officials said that limited telework availability likely contributed to recruitment and retention challenges.
The 87-page report found that each of the four agencies had a tracking system that provided accurate participation rates and other information about teleworkers and the program, such as a formal headcount of teleworkers and the extent to which they teleworked.
However, VBA does not yet have a system to easily and reliably access telework agreement information, which GAO said is necessary to maintain quality telework data. Department of Veterans Affairs officials said that VBA has identified a technology solution to expand its capability to electronically extract usable telework data directly from telework agreement forms and expects to complete implementation next month.
Finally, the GAO report found that FSA, IRS, and USCIS have not yet evaluated telework’s role in agency performance outcomes for a variety of reasons. For example, USCIS officials explained that the reason for not conducting an evaluation was because of the complexity of identifying how telework alone affects performance. FSA officials said that they have not conducted an evaluation because they were unsure of what indicators to use.
GAO made four recommendations, including that FSA, IRS, and USCIS evaluate their telework programs to identify problems or issues with the programs and make appropriate adjustments, and assess the effects of telework on agency performance.
GAO said the next report in the series will look at how the use of telework affected the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Social Security Administration, and the Department of State. GAO also said it will issue a report on Federal use of remote work.
