At Four DHS Agencies, Employees More Likely to be Disciplined than Supervisors: GAO
A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds that employees at four Department of Homeland Security agencies were more likely to face formal disciplinary action than supervisors, when facing misconduct allegations.
GAO examined disciplinary data from the U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
At all four agencies, non-supervisors were more likely to receive formal disciplinary actions, ranging from letters of reprimand to termination of employment.
For example, GAO found that at FEMA, only 11 percent of supervisors with alleged misconduct allegations were formally disciplined compared to 34 percent of non-supervisors. At CBP, that number was 12 percent and 24 percent, which was the smallest difference among the studied agencies.
Overall, most misconduct allegations “resulted in no action or informal action for all selected components regardless of supervisory status.”
Data Concerns
GAO struggled to answer why employees are formally disciplined more than supervisors, blaming incomplete and inconsistent data on the issue, and issues within the DHS data collection process.
DHS does not require agencies to indicate if employees in misconduct reports are supervisors.
GAO found that DHS agencies also did not report all misconduct allegations, because officials did not know how to interpret key terms and were sometimes unaware they needed to do so.
“By clarifying guidance for reporting misconduct data, DHS could better position components to report complete and consistent information,” GAO wrote.
GAO did speculate that “unmeasured factors, such as aggravating and mitigating factors” could explain the difference in disciplinary rates.
Recommendations
GAO made six recommendations in its report, including improving documentation of the disciplinary process at CBP, clarifying guidance on misconduct reporting, adding a supervisory status component to the reporting, and improving analysis of misconduct trends at USCIS.
DHS concurred with the recommendations.