Federal employees are filing more and more equal employment opportunity complaints, creating a massive backlog of cases that frequently take years to close, a new General Accounting Office report has found.
The backlog of unresolved discrimination complaints in federal agencies has doubled since 1991, and it now takes an average of 13 months to settle EEO cases, GAO said in "Equal Employment Opportunity: Rising Trends in EEO Complaint Caseloads in the Federal Sector" (GGD-98-157BR).
The federal EEO complaint process can include up to five steps. First, an employee files a complaint and waits to hear whether his or her agency sees grounds for an investigation. Second, the agency investigates the complaint. Third, the employee can either request a hearing before an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission administrative judge or forgo a hearing and request a final agency decision. An employee can then appeal an agency decision to the EEOC. Finally, the employee or the agency can ask the EEOC to reconsider its appeal decision.
The backlog of EEO complaints in agencies increased 84 percent from 1991 to 1996, with 31,195 backlogged complaints in 1996. The average age of a complaint in the backlog is 397 days.
Some agencies have felt the complaint boom more than others. The Agriculture Department's backlog of complaints more than tripled, from 410 complaints in 1991 to 1,405 in 1996. Agriculture's average processing time is 942 days, meaning employees and managers there typically spend more than two and a half years embroiled in the complaint process.
GAO found four main factors helped explain the burgeoning number of complaints. First, downsizing and restructuring efforts across the government have resulted in a greater number of appeals of reassignments and layoffs. Second, the 1991 Civil Rights Act motivated some employees to file complaints because it allows up to $300,000 in compensatory damages in discrimination cases. Third, the 1990 Americans with Disablities Act helped raise awareness of disability protections among the workforce. And fourth, revised regulations published in October 1992 made it easier for federal employees to use the complaint process.
Federal agencies are required by regulation to investigate complaints within 180 days of their filing. About half of employees' complaints are not processed in time. Federal regulations also require EEOC to issue a decision within 180 days of receiving a request for a hearing. About half of the hearing requests in EEOC's backlog are more than six months old.
Even though the EEOC has added 22 administrative judges since 1991, the average number of new hearing requests per judge rose from 109 in 1991 to 143 in 1996. EEOC predicts that the backlog of employees' appeals of agency decisions will rise from 9,980 at the end of 1997 to 18,953 at the end of 2002. With a backlog that size, appeals could take 1,680 days--more than four years--to process.
The Postal Service accounts for roughly half of all EEO complaints. Postal worker complaints rose from 10,221 in 1994 to 14,326 in 1997. At the same time, complaints in the rest of the federal government fell from 14,371 in 1994 to 13,261 in 1997.
Agencies are turning increasingly to alternative dispute resolution, or ADR, to more quickly address discrimination complaints, which may partially explain the recent decrease in non-postal employee complaints. Many agencies have experimented with ADR, including the Agriculture and Health and Human Services departments, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
In March, the Postal Service launched a new ADR program, called REDRESS (Resolve Employee Disputes, Reach Equitable Solutions Swiftly), after finding that more than 70 percent of cases in an ADR pilot program were resolved through mediation.
ADR program managers from across the government have formed the Federal ADR Network, which is sponsored by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. The group meets monthly to share ideas on ADR techniques and projects. For more information on the network, call 202-606-3678.
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